Ira Wagler's Blog, page 15

The “Writer”

Before we knew that we must die, before we had seen

our father’s face, before we had sought the print of

his foot….Who are we, that must follow in the footsteps

of the king? Who are we, that had no kings to follow?

—Thomas Wolfe

_______________

It’s probably that deep-seated Amish reticence inside me. I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much before, because it hasn’t seemed that important. Except I’ve thought about it a good bit lately. In all the years of posting this blog, writing a book, and just generally throwing out whatever came to mind at the moment, I have never been particularly concerned about proclaiming myself a “writer” out there in public.

I’ve written a good deal about how the process works for me, sure. And why I write. I’ve called myself a redneck who can write. But that focuses on the redneck part and warns the reader of what my perspectives might be, not so much the writing. Don’t get me wrong, here. I absolutely do not judge those who do identify themselves as writers in public. As in, Ira Wagler, writer. Or Author Ira Wagler. I don’t fault that in any way. Especially for those who depend on their craft for some or all of their income. You’d about have to, then, especially in this wired age of Twitter, Facebook, and who knows what all else I’ve never heard of. You have to build your platform, get your name and your stuff out there in an extremely competitive market.

But I don’t have to write, to make my living. I don’t. Like my father didn’t before me. He was always out there, knocking around, plunging this way and that, launching business after business. A great many of them fizzled or just flat out failed. Which didn’t faze him one bit. He just plowed right on to the next one. Some few of them succeeded. And one or two of those are all you need. So he didn’t have to write, not for the money. He never had that pressure.

Of course, he had to write because he had to write, which I understand completely. But I can’t remember that he ever called himself a writer, either. He’d stand there with folded arms and smile when some stranger from some other Amish community asked if he was David Wagler, the famous author. Famous founder of Family Life. Famous Budget scribe. One and any combination of all of those, the stranger would ask. “Oh, I write a bit, here and there,” Dad would say deprecatingly, as the stranger gaped in rapturous awe, overjoyed at the privilege of merely standing in the presence of such a famous man. (I am not making this stuff up. It really happened. I saw it with my own eyes many times.)

So I probably get a bit of my reticence from him. I don’t know. I’ve never processed it this far before. But still, I’ve always thought to myself. Don’t label yourself a writer. Just write. Your readers will decide if you are one or not. Not necessarily by calling you that, but by reading your stuff. It’s not something to concern yourself about, the label.

And from that foundation, I suppose, was born my deep natural suspicion of anything “writerly.” And the very term, “conference,” always brings to my mind a great dull blob of just numbing boredom. Which is what conferences mostly are, from my limited experiences, from what I’ve seen. And a writer’s conference, well, combine what I’ve seen with what I’ve always hesitated to speak, and you have a perfect formula for something to be avoided at all costs. Writer’s conferences. Blech.

But now I have experienced something along that line. Not a conference. But its baby brother, maybe. And that was the writer’s breakfast arranged by my friend Shawn Smucker.

I had never hung out with a group of writers before, so I had no idea what to expect, and didn’t think about it, much, until the day approached. I nudged Shawn with an email. You’re “interviewing” me, right? I don’t do well, standing up there and talking on my own. “It’ll be informal,” Shawn assured me. “It’s just a loose bunch of local writers, hanging out. I’ll guide you through with questions, and you can branch out any way you like.” Still, I was a little intimidated. I mean, why would people want to hear what I have to say about much of anything? When it comes to pole buildings, I might consider myself an expert, maybe. Fat chance, though, that anyone would ever want to hear that. But on writing? I’ve never studied that subject at all, the hows and whys of it. Never heard any lectures on it either, not since college.

But still, it would be fun, I figured, to go talk about what happened to me. I arrived at Angela’s Café just before 9:30. A very cool little place, perfect setting for writers to gather. Kind of artsy, with plenty of room off to the one side where the group was assembling. Shawn greeted me and made a few introductions. Some people were already there, more were coming. We’d hang and socialize for half an hour, then get started. I wandered about, greeting people and signing copies of my book some had brought with them.

It was a pretty diverse crowd of probably fifteen to twenty people. Shawn and I moved a tall round table to one side and set chairs behind it. And right at ten, Shawn called the group to attention. “Today we have Ira Wagler with us. I have some questions for him, then he will take your questions, too.” And off we went.

In that kind of setting, where we’re sitting with questions prompting me, I’m OK. It’s just talking. But when I have to stand behind a podium with a “presentation,” that’s when I stutter and stammer. Shawn introduced me and got started, talking about my blog. “Ira broke every rule of blogging. He posted once a week, and then on Friday nights, yet. The lowest traffic of any week night.” People laughed. And I laughed, too.

And I just kind of launched in, telling him and all of them the story of how it all came down. How the blog got started, and when. What triggered it. How I found my voice for the first time ever. I’ve written it all before, so I won’t bore you with those details here. And we just chatted right along, from one subject to the next. I strolled freely down little bunny trails, getting bogged down in the brambles sometimes. But I made one thing clear. It was a perfect storm, the way Growing Up Amish came about. The perfect combination of all the necessary forces. A rare, rare thing indeed. A big part of that perfect storm happened because I had a “hot” marketable story, I said. The Amish. I’d come from them. And I could write it, tell of it.

I told them of how it came about, the writing of the book itself. In monthly submissions. How I’d worked hard to keep my blog voice. How I try to write like I’m just talking. With a lot of fragments. How I detest exclamation points. How I weeded them out by the dozen, seemed like, from the edited version of the manuscript. Someone had stuck them in there. The writing should be the exclamation point. No need to tell the reader you’re using it. Kind of like you don’t need to tell people you’re a writer, I guess. Same concept.

And I told of how it was, to work with real, truly professional people. The best in the business, in my opinion. How my Tyndale “team” took my raw stuff and sifted and refined and fused it into the book you see today.

But it was when Shawn asked about the next book, the sequel, that I stopped and thought a bit. How could it be explained, where I am?

I don’t know, I said. I’ve never been here before. Right now, I know what needs to be written. I know the story. But I just can’t speak it. Not now. It’s not stuff you can just crank out, that kind of writing. It has to be there, inside, you have to “feel” it out. I think it’s coming. No, I know it’s coming. I just don’t know when. I catch glimpses of slivers of it now and then, out of the corner of my eye. When it shows up, I’ll write it. I don’t think of it as being “stuck.” It’s just not ready, yet, to be told. And yeah, I think sometimes too that maybe I’m just intimidated, trying to match the success of my first effort. It’s all mixed together in one big jumble in my head.

I’m writing my blog right now, because it’s a safe place, I told them. It’s always been a safe place, the place I can go back home to and be myself. It’s where I’d write if I had a hundred readers. Or ten. Right now, I’m just living. And speaking on my blog. Live. Write. And while you’re living, don’t always be thinking about what you can write when it’s happening to you. Because that will detract from living. Live. The writing of it will come on its own. (Like this blog right here. It’s not what I started out with, but it’s what came. So I wrote it.) I think every writer needs a place like that, a blog to be who you are. It’s the test, I think, of any writer. Would you write anyway, or are you out there so focused on promoting yourself that you forget what it is to write what you live?

And strangely, my audience didn’t look at me as if I were insane. Not at anything I said. Actually, they looked and listened intently.

And after Shawn was done, he opened up for questions. They came. Good, thoughtful incisive questions. These people knew my world, when it came to the mysteries of writing. The most startling question, something I had never considered before: “Did working with the Tyndale editors affect the way you write right now?” I had never thought of that. No, I don’t think so, was my first response. But then I thought a bit. Yes. Yes it does affect my writing now. I’m more conscious about using fragments. They edited out a bunch of those from my original manuscript, to make the remaining ones stronger. That’s what they told me. So yes. Except maybe when I’m getting really intense about something, then I revert to my instinctive style. I’d say that’s how it is. Great, great question.

Soon after eleven, we wrapped it up, and I hung out for another half an hour, chatting. A few people requested my book, so I went out to my truck and fetched a dozen copies. Sold and signed most of them. And then it was over.

And you know what? It was a lot of fun, hanging out with other writers. It really was. These people are my peers, in various stages of their own journeys. They have struggled and triumphed too, in their own battles with the muse. They understood where I was coming from, what I was saying. I should do it more, I guess, hanging out, I mean. Maybe, I’m thinking, I might even be ready for my first writer’s conference. But then again, maybe not. At least not just yet.

******************************************************

A few words after the election in a bitterly divided nation. We will have to endure the smirking faces of the destructive Left for four more long weary years. Worse, we’ll all be directly affected by their destructive and abhorrent policies. They won the dogfight. I don’t think there ever was any chance they wouldn’t. (And I’m not defending Romney in any way, here. I spoke my piece against him in my last blog. He lost. He’s a non-factor, now.)

I’m not a prophet. But this once, I’m going to make like one. We are done. Period. We are finished. I’m not saying it’s imminent. But bad, bad things are coming. The plunderers in this country now outnumber the producers. When that tipping point is passed, you don’t have to be a prophet to see what the future holds.

There will be no peace. The land will not heal, not with this bunch in power. (As it wouldn’t have with the other bunch, either) And it’s already begun, the thrashing beast of the state in its death throes. It always devours its wealthiest citizens first, through class warfare. It’s happening, and the process will only accelerate. Until the wealthy are consumed, and then the beast will turn to devour the rest of us. This particular scenario has unfolded so many times in history that it’s not even debatable, what’s coming. Those who cannot or will not see this are simply blind.

It’s kind of humorous to hear the pious braying from the trenches on the Left. The election’s over, and we all need to work together to get something done. Yeah, sure. As if they would have stepped right into line, had Romney won. They would not have. They would have doubled down. So I’m thinking, nah, not so much. With my voice, at least, I will oppose Obama’s domestic policies at every turn. At every point. I know who he is. I know what the Left stands for, when it comes to my personal freedoms here at home. Leave me alone, to live my life. That’s all I want. Just leave me be.

They won’t, of course, the meddlers who know what’s best for me better than I do. But I’ll dissent until they shut me up. Which may well happen. It’s pretty scary out there, what’s coming. They may shut me up, but they will never enslave my mind. Because my mind is free. It will remain free. About the only bright spot I see ahead is that the great liberty warrior, Ron Paul, will be touring and speaking at college campuses. Brilliant strategy. Take back the youth the statists have ensnared and claimed for generations. Tell them what freedom is. Show them liberty can be theirs, if they refuse to accept the statist lies. It has to take root in the youth, freedom does, to flourish. And I believe it will.

And in my own small way with my own small voice, I want to do what Ron Paul has done all his adult life. Cry freedom. Cry liberty. Stand and proclaim it. It doesn’t matter, the darkness that surrounds us. Speak the truth, regardless of the times. But speak it with a heart that is free of hatred toward any person. It’s OK to hate the state, which is an entity of real, pure evil. But it’s not OK to hate the people who preach and plant its insidious and destructive seeds that will produce only the bitterest of harvests. Or the people enforcing its tyrannical dictates. Sure, you can stand up to them, call them what they are. In anger, certainly. With righteous rage, too, sometimes. But not with hate. Because it’s never OK to hate people. Ever, for any reason. Period.

Wherever you are, live free. Because you can, in your mind. And in your heart.

And so, with good cheer and confidence, we move on into future. Yep. I said good cheer. A funny thing happened at the writer’s breakfast. After my talk, I was chatting with a lovely lady who approached me. We discussed this and that. Suddenly she said, “You are so relaxed, so cheerful. I’m surprised. Your blog writings are so…” And she paused. But then she said it. “Your blog writings are often so morose.” I laughed. Yeah, I said. That’s just my voice, I guess. The melancholy in me coming out. I get all brooding with my writing. In person, I’m actually quite cheerful. She seemed astounded, but she agreed.

Through all the black noise and political tensions, it’s a little surreal to realize that Thanksgiving is coming right up. One more year. More turkey, more football. I’m looking forward to it. The Wagler clan will gather in Hutchinson, Kansas. Where Marvin and Rhoda and Lester and Rachel (my sisters and their husbands) and their families live. Last year we gathered in Bloomfield at my nephew John Wagler’s home, and I made it. This year, well, I’ve used up more than my allotted vacation days already, because of the book. Besides, it’s a two day drive out there to Kansas. Too far, for a two day stay. So I’m passing. I’ll hang out at my brother Steve’s house with him and his family. That’s always good times and great food.

In this time and at this place, I am deeply and humbly grateful to the Lord for all my blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers.

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Perfect Storms…

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken, in America: Immense

and savage skies bend over us, and we have no door.

Thomas Wolfe

____________

1. THE STORM THAT WAS

It wasn’t called the “Perfect Storm,” at least not that I saw or heard. But it might just as well have been. It was labeled all kinds of other dramatic names. 100-year storm. Storm of the century. The Big One. And, of course, it was called by its name. Sandy.

Whatever it was, it sure served up a perfect storm of excited chatter from the weather guys. On TV, on the internet, they stood before vast screens swirling with shades of white and yellow and blue and red. This was the big one. Apocalypse now. We’ve never seen anything like this before. It might be the most devastating storm in all of recorded history. Which is just silly, when you think about it. But that’s what they said.

That storm has now unfolded, has come and gone. And true, it left huge swaths of destruction and devastation in its wake, as could reasonably be expected. That’s what hurricanes do when they hit land. Smash things indiscriminately. Especially puny man made things like houses and businesses and roads and such.

I started taking note of Sandy around mid week. I never watch any news on TV. Except as extreme weather closes in, sometimes. But otherwise, never. I listen to the radio guys, though. And the WHP weather man kept insisting. This was one big storm. Coming right up the coast and then right on in at us. And no. It would not turn out to sea. Because of certain winds and jet streams, it would turn inland. Smash into the coast. This was the big one. Storm of the century. There would be mass devastation. People would die.

Yeah, yeah, I thought. I’ve heard all this hype before. Same song, different verse. You do this stuff all the time in winter, for snowstorms and such. And every year or two, for hurricanes. You make it sound as bad as possible, trot out the very worst things that might happen, and tell us it’s going to. And it’s not that I thought it couldn’t happen. Of course it could. But there’s no way anyone can tell, way out ahead. They can guess. Maybe get it right. But they can’t know for sure until it all comes down.

About the only thing I like about hurricanes is that so far they have left us alone, my friends and me, during our annual September treks to the Outer Banks for Beach Week. It’s been close, a time or two. And one of these years, some spoiler will nail us. It will, because that’s how things even out. But so far, we haven’t had to cancel our cherished slot down on the beach. So I generally don’t have a whole lot of hostility toward hurricanes, because they’ve never done anything to me.

And the uproar persisted as the weekend arrived. Saturday. I slept in. Got up and putzed about. Decided to check the Weather Channel on TV. Yep, they’re yelling, all right. OK. I’ll get ready. Prepare a bit. Losing electricity, that was my one big fear. Lose that, and you got nothing. I checked my two little battery lanterns. Ready to go. Extra batteries on the shelf. Good, there. Now, water. I have no bathtub in my home, so I can’t fill that, like they always tell you to. I have buckets and jugs, though. So I filled a bunch of those. Set them in the porch, just outside the bathroom door. Food. I’d eat out of tin cans if I had to. I got Spam, beans, bread, chips, crackers. Facebook was swarming with Hurricane headlines. Sandy. Worst storm in 100 years. I settled in and watched the late college football games. Notre Dame whacked Bob Stoops’ Sooners at home. Good stuff, there. About time Oklahoma got humbled. And I’ve never had a thing against the Irish.

Sunday. I went to church at Chestnut Street. I wondered. Would we all huddle in little groups and pray for the storm to divert around us? Nah. Not so you’d notice, we didn’t. Sandy was never even mentioned. Pastor Mark preached his regular sermon. Good stuff. Even after church, no one seemed particularly perturbed about the storm swooping in. Guess it was just assumed we’d prepare and be prepared for whatever happened. I stood about, visiting as usual after the service. About this and that, but mostly not about the weather.

And that afternoon, Drudge Report headlines blazed with storm news. 100 mph winds, hitting shore in New York and Jersey and Philly. Philly is a little more than an hour from here. Hope those winds calm down before hitting my house. I scrounged up a few more empty jugs and filled them with tap water. Bought a bag of ice at Sheetz and placed it in my freezer. Settled in again, and watched football and kept an eye on the World Series. Detroit sure turned out disappointing. I was rooting for them. But they couldn’t even pull off one win. That’s the way it all comes down, sometimes. And I settled in around eleven for the night. Tomorrow it would arrive. The Great Storm. I’ll be totally good, if my power doesn’t go down for too long, I figured.

Electric. It’s what we depend on every day, to power pretty much everything we depend on. It’s so woven into our lives that we don’t even think about it until it’s not there. And life without it sucks, really. I can’t think of a better word than that. Yet, I kept telling myself, where I come from, we didn’t have it. Not at all. Never. And I wondered. How long could I exist without it? I don’t mean comfortably. I mean just exist. Could I revert? I didn’t want to know. I had food enough. Water enough. But how long could I last without electric, without losing my mind? I dug around for a few books. No power means no TV, and more importantly, no internet. No Facebook. No emailing. And, of course, no writing on my computer, either. I scrounged up a few Thomas Wolfe favorites to reread. And some P.G. Wodehouse books I’ve been kicking around. Power goes out, I’ll read. By lantern light, like I used to years back.

Monday. Overcast morning, the skies were spitting. It would come sweeping in at noon, they said. At the office, the phone rang sporadically. Not a lot going on out there. I watched the headlines. DC was getting hammered. All federal offices were closed. Good. The longer that cesspool is shut down, the better off we all are. If we can survive without the Feds for two days, why not the whole year? Facebook was buzzing. And even as the storm approached, the partisans couldn’t help themselves. Romney would shut down all federal financial aid for those poor hurricane victims, one lady sniped. Her friends swooped in and Oooohed, and Ahhhhed. He must be a bad man for sure. Some guy stepped in to defend Romney on the comment thread. He was instantly dismissed as being not a very good Christian. So cold hearted and all. I gape at such posts in disbelief, sometimes. Who are these people, who think like that? But it’s none of my business, really. So I’ve learned to bite my tongue a lot, too.

The chatter was good and lighthearted, mostly, though. I saw the notice that my gym was shut down, through Tuesday, at least. There goes my workout. I wondered if the whole thing wasn’t just a bit overhyped. Sure, it was blowing like crazy out there. Rain swept sideways along the ground. But we had power. Shouldn’t those business-closing decisions be made after events occurred, after the storm smashed everything, instead of before?

Well, Graber was open, and we stayed open. Around mid afternoon, I sent some people home. Just me and the yard guys remained. Not that much was going on, but still, you stay open when you can. At five, I headed home on the most deserted highways I’ve ever seen in Lancaster County. The winds swept sheets of rain across the pavement. Here and there, water roiled right over the road. Big Blue and I cautiously picked our way through. And then we were home. I settled in and hunkered down, fully expecting nothing less than the power would go at any second. Keeping a lantern close by, I surfed Facebook. Friends from the east and west and south posted updates right along. Lights are blinking, one said. Here too, said another. Then, there goes the power. We’re in the dark, here. And I waited for that inevitable blinking, for the darkness to close in on me.

It never did. Amazingly, nothing happened. The power stayed on in New Holland. And by 8 o’clock, I was watching a couple of visibly deflated local weather guys admitting that the storm had crested. The worst was over. At 8 o’clock. No gloom and doom, or people to rescue in this area, sadly. “But our warnings are still in effect,” they said sternly. “Stay inside. Don’t go anywhere unless absolutely necessary. And always stay away from downed power lines.” Yes, of course. Sorry it didn’t come down like you had hoped. But I’m liking it a lot. That’s what I thought. Monday Night Football coming right up.

Sure, Sandy was a bad hurricane. The worst in 100 years, in New York City and on the Jersey Shore, maybe the worst ever there. Just unbelievable devastation, with staggering loss of property and some lives, even. They’re struggling now with the after-effects, and will be struggling and rebuilding for a long time. But for me, and for most people in the surrounding areas, the storm of century turned out to be a little hiccup, really. We got through fine, with few effects and little damage. Just as we would have gotten through fine without all that hysteria from the media.

It’s been suggested that I might be a “storm denier,” whatever that is. Maybe I am. It’s never fun to see a big old hurricane come roaring up the coast. I try to tune it out, all the noise from all the hype, yes. So if that makes me a storm denier, so be it. That doesn’t mean I don’t prepare. It just means I take what I hear with a healthy dose of skepticism. And not panic. What will come will come. You don’t have to proclaim Armageddon to tell me a disaster might be approaching.

2. THE STORM THAT’S COMING

There’s another kind of perfect storm bearing down on us. One that will wreak havoc and destruction far worse than any Sandy could ever dream of. This storm makes me particularly grumpy, because it’s a lot harder to prepare for the aftermath. It will unleash upon the land next Tuesday. It’s called “the presidential election.”

It’s the most important election in our history, of course. Just like they all are, every four years. How that claim can be made with a straight face, again and again, escapes me. But somehow it always is, and somehow people always fall for it. I’m not knocking anyone, here. Believe what you want, be who you are. Do what you choose to. I’m just telling it how I see it. And don’t come knocking on my door proselytizing. It won’t work. Oh, and one more thing. If you actually believe the problems facing this country can or will be solved through the current terminally corrupt two-party political system, you are seriously deluded.

I detest politics. I detest both political parties in this country. And I am sick to the point of beyond exhaustion of the whole thing. The rah, rah, the marching “troops,” the blind partisanship, all of it. It’s all a vacuous exercise in abject futility.

Politics is a disreputable, dishonorable and despicable profession. And hard boiled partisans of both parties are, well, I’ll bite my tongue a bit, here. To say this much: Their guy is God and the other guy is the devil. That’s how they see it. And they will brook no criticism of their guy. None. Still, many of those partisans are very fine people, and many of them are my good friends. Except when it comes to this one issue. Then they’re simply unhinged.

I keep an eye on the race because it’s impossible not to, from all the noise around me. Whiplash from starkly opposing posts on Facebook, thousands and thousands of status updates, enough to drive you batty. (Well, I guess I do my own share of political postings, but I skewer both parties.) Wave after wave of incessant radio ads. I don’t watch much local TV, so I’ve been spared the commercials, mostly. Thankfully. And I don’t know who will pull it out, Obama or Romney. And no one else does, either, despite all the pontificating you hear. Whoever wins, the other side will scream bloody murder. Fraud. That’s how the system works now. Like two street gangs in a deadly struggle for power, using whatever means necessary. Which is exactly what it is.

The race could go either way, I guess. The servile, sycophant fawning mainstream media keeps braying that it will be Obama, of course. Those guys retain not a shred of professional credibility. They not only support Obama, they actively go out of their way to cover up his scandals and his failures. They sing hosannas to the Messiah. It’s sickening to see and hear.

Here’s my take on both candidates. (If you’re an Obama partisan, keep reading. He’s the president, so he goes first. I’ll get to Romney soon enough.)

If Obama wins a second term, the US economy will simply collapse. I don’t know when, maybe a year, maybe two. The man has no concept of how a real economy works. Big government and bigger government, those seem to be the only options he knows. And the business world is holding back, from fear of his socialist policies. Fear of his vile massive boondoggle that is ObamaCare, which in and of itself will destroy lives and countless small businesses. I work for a small business. And people are not spending money, because of Obama. They’re scared to. And businesses are not expanding because they’re scared of Obama. I can tell you that fact first hand. You can’t plunder the producers forever. The golden goose will die. There is no free lunch. There will never be a free lunch. We are pretty much in Atlas Shrugged territory, here.

If Romney wins, an economic boom will be unleashed upon the land. And things will surge, at least short term. The inevitable will be delayed a few years, but the inevitable will still come. But far more troubling, Romney is a Republican. And Republicans love nothing more than to plunge madly into another senseless, brutal, absolutely immoral war. He will do that. Attack Iran, probably. Something Obama, to his enormous credit, has staunchly refused to do. The Imams there have been designated as our current boogeymen. They’re mad and evil, all of them. And as a reflection of their leaders, all Iranians are mad and evil too, including the masses of innocent civilians. That’s how propaganda works.

Perpetual war is the health of the state. And I am stridently, passionately anti-war. Like my father was all his life, and still is. I’m not a pacifist, like he claims to be, though. I will leave you in peace, but if you come at me to harm me, I will use whatever force necessary to defend myself. But when it comes to war, I see it as he does. I’m there, with him. I just arrived through a different door. Funny, how that big circle works sometimes.

It’s irrational, and it’s so far from what Christ taught, the insatiable blood lust for war that afflicts many if not most American Christians. It’s shameful, the mindless braying. Real people are dying, and they cheer and sing. But the Lord will hear the innocent blood that cries to Him from desolate war-ravaged lands far away. From the killing fields in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and the whole Mideast. Those are His children, too, the ones killed by US bombs. As are the ones who starved or died from lack of medicines because of US sanctions. Those are His children, too, the ones maimed or incinerated by US drone strikes. (And yes, Obama is killing indiscriminately with drone strikes, too, as the partisan Left cowers in craven silence.) All blood is red. It doesn’t matter who is shedding it. God will never bless an aggressor nation. Especially not a nation that engages in such indiscriminate civilian slaughter. He will not, because He is Love. And love and murder are incompatible in any honest frame of reference.

So there you have it. Those are your options. In this election you have a choice, all right. Two parties. Two candidates. It’s a choice between the destruction of our economy at home, or the blood and death, the senseless slaughter of people far away who have never done a thing to harm us. What price, our own economic comfort? What price, the slaughter of innocents we don’t know and will never know? What price, love?

It’s a devil’s bargain, either way. Take your pick. Choose your poison. Because when it comes to these two candidates, those are the only choices you have.

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Tightrope…

What have you given, incredible mirage of all our million

shining hopes, to those who wanted to possess you wholly…

from whom you took the strength, the passion, and the

innocence of youth?

Gigantic city, we have taken nothing – not even a handful

of your trampled dust…and left not even the print of a heel

upon your stony-hearted pavements.

—Thomas Wolfe

________________

The email was waiting for me when I got to work one morning earlier this year. It was a grand little email, I thought. Dear Ira. I’m a producer for so-and-so (big-name TV show host in NYC), and we’re doing a segment on the Amish. I found your book, then your blog. Would you be interested in talking?

There was a time when I would have practically swooned at such a message. Or maybe danced around the office a bit. High-fived someone. The big boys from New Yawk City. They want me. Oh, boy. Yes, yes, I’m all into talking. Any time you want, for as long as you want.

Such a time was in the past, though. This time, I read the email, dubious. Doubtful that anything would come of it. Well, sure, I’d be interested. So I emailed back. Sure. Here’s my number. Call me any time. Within minutes, the phone rang. The producer from the big bad city.

“Here’s how it is,” he said. A young guy, from the sound of it. He was friendly and outgoing, like they all are. “We’re interviewing some ex-Amish people, and wanted to round out the group. I found your site. Looks pretty impressive. Any way you could make it on an early train day after tomorrow, for the show?”

Sure, I can make it. I chuckled. Look. I’ve talked to producers before. You promise the world. So far, your record for actually coming through has been pretty abysmal. Sure, I’d love to come on the show. I’m here. You figure out if I’ll make it, and let me know. I’ll be there if you tell me to be.

“I’ll let you know one way or another,” he promised. I only half believed that. From past experiences, they just vanished without at trace, producers like him. But he called a couple more times that afternoon with specific questions. He was hopeful that I’d get to go. And then the next day he called again. True to his word. Told me ruefully. It hadn’t worked out. His bosses had decided against his recommendation. That’s fine, I told him. Email me your address, and I’ll send you a copy of my book anyway. He did. And I did. Who knows? Spread some seed for down the road.

One thing I’ve learned in these past two years. Especially concerning the TV film people. Whatever promises they make, whatever breathless scenarios they throw at you, don’t ever, ever expect a thing to actually come down. Never. Not until it really happens. And by “really happens,” I mean when your segment appears on the TV screen in your living room. Because most of the time, it won’t. It’s nothing personal against me, from their perspective, I’m convinced. As it’s nothing personal against them from mine, either. It’s just the nature of the business.

I’ve always said I will go anywhere, on any format, I mean, to talk about my book. Not necessarily any physical location. But on any channel. Any station. It doesn’t matter. And I’ll scheme and plot and plan and connive to get my book into the hands of influential public figures. That’s just part of getting your stuff out there. And I’ll still do it. In the past month, I’ve had friends personally hand a signed copy of the book to one of my greatest heroes ever, Lew Rockwell. And a signed copy to Willie Nelson, handed to his personal assistant. And last week I mailed a copy to Oprah’s fan club.

Way more likely than not, I’ll never hear a peep from anyone from the production of all that effort. But it’s part of the seeding, that effort. Throw your stuff out there. Like the Bible says the sower did. Some of it will fall on rocky soil, sure. Some of it will fall among thorns and choke to death. And some small remnants might just sift through somehow to some patches of fertile soil. And sprout and grow and bring forth a thousand fold. You never know. So you just keep seeding.

Back in the heady days of mid-2011, Debbie Lykins, the extremely competent independent publicist hired by Tyndale to promote my book, lined up a ton of radio interviews for me. At least thirty, maybe forty. And they all came off as scheduled. A few minutes before the appointed time, I would head upstairs to an unused office at work. Sit there, until the call came through. And they always came. Ten minutes, some of the interviews. Most were more like twenty, or half an hour. A few lasted a full hour. And I was fine with all of it. I didn’t have to study for anything. I knew my subject matter. Radio was cool, and I enjoyed it. And when they scheduled me, the radio people, they always called as promised.

Not so the film people. Sure, they called and bugged me several times. Way early this year, I got a call from a young female producer from NYC. She was working for a big-name guy who has a daily cable show. And she was right here, in Lancaster County. Scouting for some real Amish people to talk to. I felt sorry for her. She’d been thrown out here, told to come up with something. Talk about pressure. Sure, I said. I’ll do what I can. Stop by. And she drove right on over to see me. I chatted with her for a few minutes, to see what she really wanted. Her cell phone kept interrupting us. Calls from her office in the city, I figured. She wanted to talk to some real Amish people, that’s what she said. So I called in some favors, pushed my limits way out there. Bothered some friends who don’t necessarily care to be bothered. And I got her connected with a young Amish couple that very day. She thanked me profusely and rushed off. She met my friends and spoke with them. Would they consider being interviewed off-camera for the show? I never asked, but I think my friends agreed. And the young producer headed back to NYC and was never heard from again. Because the idea for the segment was scrapped. After all that running, after all that bother. That’s just the nature of the business.

But still, it’s irritating. They come in and spout some big shot TV name and expect you to fall all over yourself. Expect you to help them out. Which I’ve always done, or tried to do. The lure of mainstream exposure is just too strong to resist. However irritating.

But that young producer from NYC was far from my worst experience. A little over a year ago, Debbie got me hooked up with one of the major Christian TV production companies in the world. And these people actually planned to come out and film me. I did the interview on the phone, with the intake lady. We got along fine. And about a week later, they showed up, a producer and two cameramen. For two days, they were around. I showed them around the area, and they shot a great deal of film footage. I even coerced one of my Amish yard guys to take me on a buggy ride. One of the camera guys sat in the back and filmed. We did several hours of filming in a real Amish home. And great grand promises were made, oh yes, they were.

The segment would run on the morning show, and it would be seen by millions of viewers. Sometime in October of last year, that’s when it would air. I met the filming crew for the second day for a few hours. In my home. And then they were off, with many blessings bespoken from both sides. I eagerly anticipated the actual airing.

And October came. Then went. My segment never aired. No word, from anyone. I stressed a little. But really not that much. I figured it would come, sooner or later. But if it didn’t, it just didn’t. By late November, I nudged Debbie the publicist. Can you check it out, to see what’s going on? She sent a query. If she even got any response, it was a mumble. Or maybe a grunt.

And the segment never aired. Never. Not after a film crew was sent to interview me for two days. And all the expense involved with that. Not after all those shining glorious promises. I can honestly say this, though. Through it all, I let it rest, in my mind. Sure, I fretted a bit. All those “millions of viewers” would have purchased a good many books, I figured. But there was nothing I could do, to make it happen, to make the film air. That’s what I realized. And the whole thing just kind of slipped away in time.

Then, in late February, my Google alert snagged an interesting link on YouTube. I pulled it up and clicked to watch. Then I posted it on Facebook. It was me being interviewed by the film crew that had spent two days with me. Six plus minutes of professionally edited footage. Beautifully done. And then it just cut off, ended abruptly, right in mid sentence.

The project was never finished. No wonder it never aired. And I wondered why. Why go to all that expense and effort, then just pull out? Why not finish what you started? None of that makes a lick of sense to me, but it doesn’t have to, I guess. I chalk it down to “the nature of the business.” And try not to think of what might have been.

The footage had been released by mistake, and within a few days, it was pulled back. By that time, though, someone else had downloaded it. And when the link disappeared, that someone threw it right back out on the web.

In all my experiences with film crews, there was one that stood out, one little group that actually kept its promises. All the way. And that was Mose Gingerich and his producer, who were in the area at exactly the same time as the other film crew. Those were hectic days for me. Mose came to my workplace and we talked. That night, they came to a book talk I had scheduled with a group of campers in a local campground. His producer filmed and filmed and filmed. They didn’t make a lot of hype about anything. But when the hit show, Amish Out of Order, aired on National Geographic earlier this year, there I was. In one episode, in a very cool five-minute segment. From all the talking and filming, they could have chosen to make me look good, or make me look bad. They made me look very good indeed. So that was the one very positive experience I’ve had with the film people. Don’t know why a few more of them couldn’t have been like that. It’s the nature of the business, I suppose.

I’ve called it a wild and beautiful road, certain stretches of the past year. As it was, and continues to be, now and then. But it’s kind of like walking a tightrope, too, sometimes. As in trying to keep your balance. To not freak out at times. To stay focused on living and letting it all come down as it may. To not let all the noise get to me, to not get bogged down with what might have been. Or what might yet be. To rest, emotionally. To trust God, to know He’s there, when faith is hard and distant. To let go of things, when I need to. I sway a good bit sometimes in the winds. But so far, I’ve managed to keep walking the wire without losing my balance or my mind. I think. I try hard to be who I know I am. Sometimes it’s tough to tell just exactly who that is.

The book will have to stand on its own merits. Overcome any roadblocks on its own. Move along, regardless of what happens or doesn’t. Regardless of what promises were kept or broken. That’s what I think. That’s what I believe.

And I’ll still respond, when some young producer calls or stops by, frantic for information or connections. Sure, I’ll meet with you. Connect you. I’ll do what I can. Some day, some time, it will all come together. It will all work out, I think.

Last Saturday afternoon, I fetched my mail. Usually it’s just junk stuff. That’s what the post office delivers now, mostly. Junk. But that day, there was something more. A letter from Tyndale. A nice oblong white envelope. I walked into the house and opened it. Read the greeting. Stared at the subject matter line. And I looked to the heavens with a grateful heart.

The wind is calm, up here on the tightrope. And the wild and beautiful road rolls on.

***************************************************

I have never attended a writer’s conference. Never. Someday, I may expound a bit more on why that is. For me, it boils down to something like this: If you’re the social/networking type that enjoys that kind of thing, cool. Go have fun. But if you have to go to a writer’s conference to “learn” anything, well, I should probably just bite my tongue. But, ah, what the heck? I will say this much. Too many writers, I think, are so busy running around connecting with each other and lapping up the lectures at conferences that they forget what it is to live. And if you don’t live, you’ll have little to write that’s real. By “real,” I mean the stuff that’s in your heart to speak. The stuff you would throw out for free, even if you knew that few or none would ever read it. There’s nothing real in formulaic prose that anyone else who attended a writer’s conference might have cranked out.

Forget the formulas. Forget the “ten steps to writing a bestseller,” or whatever steps to whatever goal they’re pushing these days. And just write your heart. Trust it. Speak it honestly. In all its doubts and fears and rage and pain. And in all the good things, too, the gratitude and joy. Say it like it is, in the moment. Live. Write. Develop your distinctive voice. Don’t overstress the rules of grammar. Be who you are, with all your flaws. Let it take you where it will, your writing. All that is probably not stuff they’ll tell you at any writer’s conference. But that’s the way I see it, so I’m telling you here.

And that little lecture was triggered from trying to get to saying this. I’m a loner, mostly, but I do enjoy hanging out with other writers now and then. And when my good friend Shawn Smucker recently invited me to a local writer’s breakfast, I accepted without hesitation. So it’s all happening over at Angela’s Cafe in Gap on Saturday morning, Nov. 3, from 9:30 to 11:30. During at least part of our time together, Shawn will interview me about my journey from writing a simple weekly blog to the great shining city that is Tyndale House.

The event is open to the public. And you don’t have to be a writer to attend. The only cost will be the money you spend on coffee and food. So if you can make it, I’d love to see you there.

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Customer Service…

For he had learned some of the things that every man

must find out for himself, and he had found out about

them as one has to find out — through error and through

trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood

and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and

wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful

and believing and confused.

—Thomas Wolfe

_________________

The customer is always right. Of course, we all know that. It’s, like, written in the Constitution or something. At least, one could think that, from the incessant recitation of the phrase. The customer is always right. No exceptions.

In the past month or so, I’ve checked out that little truth from both sides. As a customer dealing with a vast faceless company. And as a vendor dealing with an irate customer. And from those two experiences, I guess I’d reword the phrase into something a bit longer and more cumbersome. But more true. Your customer is always right. Except when he isn’t. But even when he’s wrong, that doesn’t necessarily make you right, either.

Way back in 2007 when I launched this blog, my only home computer connection was through the phone line. Dial up. I shudder when I think of how it was. Ancient, slow, decrepit. Within weeks, after much frustration, I realized something would have to be done. So I called Verizon, and chatted with a friendly sales lady. I signed up. A nice man came out and installed DSL service and connected it all to a little modem under my desk. I felt very liberated. This was cutting edge stuff.

Within months, though, there were issues. Whenever it rained hard, I lost the internet. Verizon sent out a tech now and then, after much hollering from me. And they always got the system cobbled back together. I needed new wiring in the basement, one of them told me. And that service wasn’t included in my contract, so there was nothing he could do. Hm, I said. You know, I’m seriously thinking of calling Comcast. And he suddenly located some “old” wiring in his van and installed that in the basement for me. The connection was saved. As was my relationship with Verizon, at least for the moment.

They were mostly good guys, the techs. Cheerful. And so it went, mostly OK, for the past five years. But about once or twice a year, the modem had a temper tantrum. Its little green eyes would blink balefully. Open and close at random. And my connection opened and closed with the evil little eyes. I grumbled at Verizon. And now and then, they sent out a new modem, and things would roll along again for a while.

Lately though, the connection has been abysmal. Even when the modem eyes shone bright. I’d click on a link, and the little connection wheel sat there and spun and spun. Increasingly the service got worse. Then about a month ago, the modem went haywire again. Kicked off on a great fit of random blinking. And one night late, as I sat there seething, I googled Comcast on my iPhone and called the number. A nice man from another country seemed very excited to hear from me.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “We can fix you up with high speed internet and cable. For much less than you are paying for Verizon and Dish Network combined. And yes, you can keep your phone number. No problem.” It’s very important to me, to keep my old number, I said. “No problem at all,” he reassured me. OK, then. I’ll bite. The nice man from India congratulated me with such elation that I figured I’d won the lottery, almost. Then he signed me up. Soon the vile little green modem eyes would mock me no more.

And two days later, an installer showed up. An energetic guy in a tiny little pickup sagging under racks and great long ladders. “I’ll have you hooked up in an hour,” he promised cheerfully. Oh my, how cool, I thought. An hour. That’s fast. He strung up a long extension ladder on a nearby telephone pole, climbed up and opened a mysterious box and fiddled around with whatever was inside. I watched. He then came inside and strung cables and wires throughout my house. Drilled a hole through my floor into the basement and yanked up a cable from below. He smiled and chatted right along. And then it was time to hook everything up. But strangely, nothing worked. The guy seemed perturbed. Yeah, that’s how it goes, I thought. It won’t work here, at my house, because, well, that’s just how things tend to go.

He walked outside and called his supervisor. They talked quietly and seriously for a few minutes. Then he approached me. They’d have to give me a temporary telephone number, to get the internet hooked up. But it wouldn’t be a problem. My old number would be transferred back within a few hours. Uh, I’m dubious here. That was a promise, I said. That I could keep my old number. He smiled. “Yes, yes, you will keep it.” OK, then. Hook it up with the new number. And he did. Within minutes, I had cable TV and high speed internet, right on my PC. Right in my house. Woo, Hoo. I thanked the guy. Shook his hand. And gave him a signed copy of my book. He smiled some more and promised to read it and tell all his friends. And then I went off to work.

And, of course, when I called in later that evening to get my phone number switched back, it all morphed into la la land. I dialed 1-800-Comcast, like they had told me. Punched in my account number, the last four digits of my social security number, my life history, and so forth. And then stayed on hold. On hold. On hold. Then, a lady’s bright voice. From India, I’d wager my house. I told her what I wanted to do. Switch back to my old phone number. She was very sympathetic.

“Oh, I am so sorry you are having a problem,” she said. Yes, yes, keep reading the script, I thought. All I need is someone who can speak to me and help me. “Let me see what I can do about that.” Great. She punched around on her keyboard, checking her list for more wide open, generally asinine questions. Finally, she conceded. “I’ll have to transfer you to the next level. I’ll put you on hold.” Music. For minutes. Another lady’s bright voice. “Oh, I’m so sorry you are having a problem.” Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you are. I appreciate that. Just get me some help here. I didn’t say that, just thought it. “I’ll transfer you to the tech department,” she said. Music, then. For minutes. Then, suddenly, deadness. Nothing. I was disconnected. Gaaah. Now I’d have to jump through all those hoops again.

The next day, I jumped through the hoops and spoke with a nice lady from York, PA. Practically next door. She told me she wasn’t sure I could keep my old phone number. “That’s now a Leola number, and you live in New Holland. It might not be possible to get it switched back.” It was a promise, I said. “I’ll see what I can do, I’ll fill out the request,” she replied. I’m leaving for the beach for a week, I said. When I come home, I want it to be fixed.

It wasn’t, of course. And I decided to unlimber the big guns. I called again, the Tuesday after returning from the beach. This time, the call went overseas again. A lady answered in almost good English. Almost good, but still from India, I figured. I need to get my old number switched back, I said. I’m an attorney. I was promised I could keep my old number. It’s important.

I rarely, rarely play the “attorney” card. Almost never. Only when it’s absolutely necessary. As this now seemed to be. The lady from India stuttered a bit, then said she’d transfer me to the right department. Music for a minute. Then two. Then a clear American English voice. “John speaking. How can I help you?” I didn’t mention anything about being an attorney. Just told him I’d like my old phone number back. It’s important. I got it printed on my business cards. “That should be no problem. We can port it over,” he said. “Give me four business days.” That’s great, I said. Can you send me an email to verify our conversation? Yes, he could. And he did.

It took more than four days. But after a nudging email from me earlier this week, in which I did mention the word “attorney,” John got it done. My old phone number is still my phone number. It took a bit of work, but I can’t complain much about Comcast’s customer service. It’s a labyrinth, sure, and you have to figure it’s going to take a while to get anything done. But I can’t complain. Not much. Not so far.

Back a month or two ago, I saw it from the other side. Well, I see it from the other side every day, really. But not usually from an irate customer. The situation just slipped in on me, totally unexpected. And it spiraled right on down into a dimension I had never seen before.

Graber is a quality company. We take pride in our identity, take the extra step to ensure customer satisfaction. We always have. If I can’t work it out with you, well, that’s not an option. I will work it out. Somehow. And then, that day came a test.

It was about twenty til five. Almost closing time. It had been a hectic day. Dave and Eric, the other two sales guys, had already left, for one reason or another. Rosita and I were winding it down. The phone rang intermittently. And then it rang again. I listened as Rosita talked to the person on the other end.

“No, Eric’s on the road.” A pause. “All right. I’ll transfer you.” And my phone beeped. I answered. “Some guy wants to talk to someone in management,” Rosita said. A red flag waved in the distance, in my head. Management. He asked to speak to someone in management. OK, I said. And she transferred the call.

“This is ‘Ray’.” The hostile voice came through my headset. “What’s your position at Graber?” It was an attack, the way he asked the question. I’m a manager, I answered politely. What can I do for you?

And Ray explained, fairly coherently. He lived in upstate New York. A few weeks back, he’d bought some metal roofing from us. A small order. His friend, who lived in our area, had picked up the order and delivered it to him. Good so far, I figured. But we had sent only half enough screws to attach the metal. He had half his roof on. Now he needed some more screws. His friend was coming back up this weekend.

Well that’s no reason to get hostile, I thought. I chuckled into the phone. That’s no problem, I said. Just have your friend stop by, and I’ll gladly sell him another bag of screws. He can bring them right up to you. No problem at all.

But it was a serious problem, in Ray’s mind. “I ordered the metal. You didn’t send me enough screws. I want you to give them to me.” He sounded old, cantankerous and mad. I shouldn’t have done it. But it was late, almost closing time. And I couldn’t stop myself. Or wouldn’t. I flared. Look. I’m not sending you any free screws. That’s not how it works.

Ray was a practiced hand at harassing customer service reps, that much became very clear in the next few minutes. “I ordered the metal. You should have known how many screws I needed,” he said. “I want you to send them to me free. You owe them to me.”

How dense could the guy be? Look, I said impatiently. I didn’t take this order, so I don’t know what was said or wasn’t. But even if we figured the amount of screws wrong, had we figured it right, you would have paid for them. You would have spent exactly what they cost you. So you’re short right now. But you will have to pay for the screws. It’s one bag. 250 screws. That’s fifteen bucks. That’s all I can do for you. But you aren’t getting them for nothing. I will not do that.

He was an old practiced hand at this game. He’d gotten away with a lot, in his lifetime, harassing customer service people. With oily ease he shifted, like he was reading from a script. “I want the name of your supervisor.” Smugly, like he expected me to wither.

This is as high as it goes, here, for you. I shot back. “Then I want the complaint department,” he said next. I am the complaint department, I said. And back and forth we went for another minute. Then, “I want the full address of your corporate office, and the name of the public relations person.” I’m sure he’d sent many a customer service rep dashing for cover in the past with that demand. But not this time. This is the corporate office, I replied. Like I said before, this is as high as it goes for you. Look. It’s almost five, and I got things to do. And again he came back, hedging for time. “Then I want the mailing address for your office.” It’s on your invoice, I said. “I don’t have that with me right now.” Find it, I said. The mailing address is right there at the top of the invoice. Feel free to write.

Silence, then, as he absorbed my words. He wasn’t done. One more shot. “I don’t like your attitude,” he huffed. Nope. I’m not going down that bunny trail. I was done. Suit yourself, I said. And then I did something I have never done before. Ever, to anyone, in all my life (except the occasional pesky sales person, but that doesn’t count). I hung up on the man. And I sat there, seething and drained.

The next morning, I checked it out with Eric at the office. Ray had called, I told him. And I told him how it went. It turned out that Ray’s local friend had ordered the metal and the amount of screws. Eric had just taken the order over the phone and written it up. Ray may or may not have known that. Chances are, though, that he had tried to pull a fast one on me.

But still. I was highly irritated at myself. I don’t lose my cool like that. Don’t lose control. Not like that. Not to where I hang up on a customer. That’s not my heart. I could have handled it calmly. I should have. Sure, it was late in the day, and I was frazzled. Not prepared to be attacked. But my reaction was wrong. Way, way wrong.

The problem is, you have to be prepared, mentally and emotionally, all the time. You can’t ever let your guard down. Because you never know when the doors will open and the crap comes pouring in. When some irate person will come at you, right or wrong. That’s just how it is. Not just in sales, but in life as well.

Some “Ray” will assail me again, for reasons that make no sense to me. That’s a given, and it’ll happen soon enough. And I don’t know if the outcome will be different. But I think my attitude and my reaction will be. I can’t know for sure until it happens, I guess. But I know where my heart is.

****************************************************

My book talk at Grove City College came down last Friday evening. And, in retrospect, the whole trip was one of those experiences that will always stay with me. My good friend from our Bob Jones days, Dr. Mark Graham, got me into the place. I mean, how many authors get to go to any college and talk about their book? Mark and I were classmates during my two years at BJU, and I last saw him and his wife Becky eighteen years ago when I was a groomsman at their wedding in Rhode Island. I wore a tux for the first time ever that day.

Mark always spoke and breathed history, back in those days. A doctorate in history is kind of like an English degree of any level. With it and a couple of bucks, you can buy yourself a cup of coffee at most gas stations. Mark is one of the very few people I know who pursued his passion and is doing exactly what his heart always called him to do. What he’s always known he would do. Teaching, breathing and writing history.

Mark met me when I arrived at the campus, and we picked up right where we had left off, way back. I could still see the eager young student in him, back in the classroom. We talked full speed as he showed me the college grounds. Beautiful place, Grove City. Had my life taken a slightly different curve along the tracks, I could easily have attended there as a student. Mark proudly regaled me with the history of the place.

And later his wife Becky, looking young as ever, smiled and greeted me with a hug. Introduced me to their three well-mannered daughters and their youngest child, four-year-old Ira. No, I wasn’t his namesake, his great-grandfather was. But I told the boy, who has an orator’s voice if I ever heard one in a child so young, to always be proud of that name. There aren’t many of us out there.

After dining with Mark and a small group of his colleagues and friends, we headed on over to the hall where I would speak. A beautiful, brand new building. This was the first such event to be held there, Mark told me. They had set up 150 chairs. I seriously doubt that many people will show up, I said. A crowd of 25 or 30 is more than respectable.

I didn’t have much time to get nervous. A few outside people trickled in, including an old law school friend from way back. Kelly Tua Hammers and her father drove the two hours from Latrobe, over close to Pittsburgh. Kelly and I were in the same study group through three years of law school. We became close friends. Such bonds are never forgotten. She hugged me and showed me pictures of her husband and two beautiful children. And I seated her and her Dad right up in the front row.

At about 6:25, the doors opened and students poured in by the dozens. All the chairs were grabbed in about two minutes. Standing room only. And still they came. After 250 people crammed the room, the doors were shut. No more were allowed in. My friend Mark must have really harassed his students to show up, I thought.

Then it was time. I’m not a public speaker, not used to talking to packed rooms. But somehow, after a few nervous moments, it all came down OK. I spoke for 20 minutes, read a scene from the book, and then took questions from the audience for the remainder of the hour. The students asked thoughtful, intelligent questions. It was a lot of fun. And then it was over.

Turned out there was a reason the students had flooded my event so enthusiastically. It’s just funny, really. At Grove City, you have to attend a certain number of chapel services each semester. Fourteen, or some such small amount. Which would just appall the Bob Jones people, but seems perfectly sensible to me. Anyway, somehow my book talk was credited as a chapel attendance. So it was an easy credit to any student who wandered in. Which they did, in great numbers. So that’s why the room was so full. But hey, it was all just part of a great experience. I’m grateful for any audience of that size, even if a little “coercion” was applied.

The next day I headed east and south for Carlisle, PA, for the fifteenth reunion of my law school class. The first such event I’ve attended in fifteen years. I don’t usually pay any attention whatsoever to what’s going on back in the schools I attended. It’s not that I have anything against the schools, or against such events, it’s just that I don’t want to be bugged by Alumni Associations. First you attend, next thing you’re being dragged onto some committee, and of course, there’s always the delicate matter of raising funds. It’s all such a wearying of the mind. It’s better to just make a clean break.

But this year it worked out, because I was on the road anyway. So I went. And it was great. I reconnected with friends and classmates, many of whom I had not seen since graduation. There was a reception, a brief speech, and a nice banquet. Then a bunch of us headed over to The Gingerbread Man, a local watering hole, and hung out until the wee hours. Shooting pool and just generally having a grand old time. Some things never change.

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Mumblings From The Beach

“There comes a time in a man’s life when he hears the call of the sea.

If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.”

–Dave Barry

___________

Come on down, they told me again this year. It’ll be better than ever. Yeah, yeah, I thought. Not that I needed any convincing. I’ll be there. But it will be better, they said. This year, we rented a house right on the beach. Walk out the back door, and there’s the ocean.

And the date snuck up on me, like it always does. You plan out a year ahead, and what you’re planning is a year away. A long time. But then the weeks pass, and the months. And last week I sat up and took notice. Beach Week was upon me. On Saturday evening, I packed up and got ready to leave the next day.

This year, they got the house from Sunday to Sunday, not Saturdays like always before. That was different. And this year, as Janice promised, the house was literally on the beach. She had located it online on the way home from last year’s excursion. And booked it right there on the spot. Sure, it cost a few bucks more. But it would be worth it, she claimed. All the others in the group clamored in as well. Yes, yes, it would be worth it.

As I’ve stated many times before, I’m no beach hound. I totally don’t get how people can waste days and days, stretched out on big towels in the sand, soaking up the sun. I mean, there’s a whole lot of other things that are way more attractive to me. But ever since my first Beach Week two years ago, I have returned faithfully. Not because of the location, but because of the people. My friends. I’d hang out with them anywhere. In the mountains, in the city, wherever. And, of course, “wherever” includes the beach.

Other than the beach house itself, I figured this year would be different anyway. Because the last two years, my head was pretty much screwed up in one way or another. The first year, I was working on the book. Wrapping up a monthly submission. And that month, it was the Sarah story. So my mind was in a far place all that week, mostly. And somehow, it worked, to get it written with all the noise around me. I thought it might not, but it did. And when I got home from that first excursion, I emailed that chunk of writing to my Tyndale people the following Monday morning. And what you read in the book is pretty much how I wrote it at the beach.

Last year, I was just a mess, emotionally. It wasn’t just during Beach Week, it was the general state of mind I was in. Looking back, that came from the book as well. It had been out there a few months and was plunging about quite madly. I was sitting there, holding my breath in disbelief, hoping it would hang in there for a while before sinking into oblivion. It was all a bit of a tense time. And I have to say, I wasn’t that sociable last year at the beach.

And this year, well, there’s lots of different kinds of noises in my head. Concerning the book and life and a few other things, like a possible sequel. But this year, as the day approached, I made some promises to myself. This year, there were some things I would do, every day. No matter what else got done or didn’t.

I would read. Strange as it may sound, I haven’t read more than a handful of books in the last few years. Been too busy, writing. Sure, I read my favorite news and opinion sites on the web every day. But that’s mostly short stuff, essays and such, that take a few minutes to work through. Reading a book takes time and commitment. And I’ve been slacking on those, a lot. So I packed a book that has been on my list for a couple of years. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, by Albert Jay Nock. The most learned social critic of his generation, Mr. Nock never enjoyed much popularity in his lifetime. Because he wrote it as he saw it, and he saw it through eyes that refused to worship or acknowledge the “goodness” of the state. He saw both World Wars and judged them for what they were. He wrote what he saw and what I consider the truth against all the prevailing tides of his times. I have long admired the man and figured to read his opus at the beach.

And by late Saturday night, I had it all stashed away, all the stuff I figured I needed for the week. And more. When I travel over the road, I always pack heavy. It’s easy to pile stuff in a suitcase. Better to have more than you need then to have to run out and buy what you left behind. That’s my philosophy.

Sunday morning. I woke up early, before six. Like a regular work day. On Sundays, I usually sleep in until 8:30 or so, then get up and go to church. But this Sunday would be spent on the road, not in church. I’d loaded some of my bags the night before. I showered and threw the rest of my stuff into my truck. Headed on over to Wilma’s house.

Wilma, my good friend, and a close friend to Janice, was traveling down to Beach Week with me for the second year. Last year was her first. She enjoyed the time very much. Last year, I drove my truck down. And this year, she offered to take her little car, providing we could pack all our stuff in it. A Corolla. That’s what she has. A cool little car. Gets a heck of a lot better gas mileage than Big Blue. I pulled in at 6:45. We loaded her stuff and mine, in the back seat and in the trunk. The car could have held a bit more, But not much. By seven, we hit the road, with me behind the wheel.

This Sunday to Sunday rental deal wasn’t half bad, we decided, as we cruised the lightly traveled roads. Almost empty, they were, compared to what they would have been the day before, on a Saturday. We stopped once, for a break and for some gas, halfway down. We both like to travel the same way. If you’re going somewhere, hit the road until you get there.

And by 2:30, we arrived in Nag’s Head, NC. Janice and her friends Brian and Melanie had arrived a bit before. They were waiting for us at Awful Arthur’s, a famous Nag’s Head hangout. We wouldn’t get the keys to our house until after 3 PM. So we figured we might as well eat a bit. It’s a great feeling, an indescribable feeling, to loaf around like that, waiting for a full week of vacation to begin. After eating, we stopped at Awful’s gift shop and picked up a few mementos. Then on to our Beach House.

We followed Janice and Brian and Melanie and soon pulled up to a long, lean, tall house on stilts. Three stories high. Let’s explore first, before the others get here, and pick out our bedrooms. As the older, crotchety, grumpy guy, I’m always allowed a good deal of leeway to pick a bedroom in a corner somewhere, far away from any late night partying. I last until midnight, usually, maybe a bit later sometimes. But then I want to go off to a quiet place. On the second floor up front I found the perfect room. Here I stake my flag, I said. And the others, too, rushed about and claimed their rooms. The latecomers, my nephew Steven and his friends from South Carolina, would be left with whatever remained.

The first and second floors contained bedrooms, game rooms, lounge areas, and more bedrooms. The third floor, though, that’s what took our breath away. A large open room with full kitchen in one corner. Off to one side, a twenty-foot long table, hewed from a solid slab of thick varnished wood. And there were folding glass wood-framed doors that opened to the deck. Open or closed, you could see the ocean from the dining room. Hear the crashing incessant waves. We stood there in awe for a few moments, then rushed to unload our stuff. Lugged all our bags and groceries to the first floor. But we didn’t have to drag anything upstairs. Because this beach house had an elevator. Small, very slow-moving, but there. We piled our stuff in, and distributed it about on the appropriate floors. And soon enough, the others all showed up, the group that we would hang with this week.

My nephew Steven Marner drove his large van from South Carolina. Loaded with a week’s worth of luggage, and loaded with friends. I knew most of them, but a few new faces appeared this year. We shook hands and introductions were made. Laid back people, all of them. An hour later, after we’d all unpacked, we lounged about upstairs in the main floor.

And I drifted among them, my friends from South Carolina, old and new. And I heard their lazy drawling talk, and marveled. They sat out there on the deck, comfortable and deliberate. Lit their cigarettes, sipped their drinks, and just talked. Visited is another word for it. They just visited. The threads of their conversations flowed here and there, utterly unguided, with no particular goal. Such a thing is unheard of where I come from. Sure, we talk of this and that, the little things. But everyone is in some sort of rush to keep pace with a hectic schedule. And our talk reflects that. Short, abrupt, terse, is what we are. I sensed no such undercurrent in their words or gestures, those South Carolina rednecks. None. They were here, in this beach house, settling in for the week. And they were relaxed, in no hurry whatsoever to go anywhere or to do anything. I thought of where I’d come from, and how it was like that back there, at least the visiting part. And I envied them.

And from that slow, unhurried rhythm, the week just launched itself. Everyone just chilled. On Monday, I set out on my first walk along the beach. To the south pier, exactly 1.2 miles away. Trudged along the soft sand, barefoot, in shorts, T shirt and camo cap. My legs sure felt it, the first few days. Walking 2-1/2 miles in the sand is like walking five miles on pavement, I’m thinking. The beach was sparsely settled, mostly. It’s like that after Labor Day, I figured. Little groups huddled here and there, people sprawled out on large towels. And the occasional lonely fisherman, casting out far beyond the break, hopefully waiting for a nibble. In all my time on the beach in the past three years, I have never seen a single fisherman hold up as much as a single tiny fish. That first morning, I wondered if they were just standing there to be standing there, mourning the loss of summer.

I settled into my reading that first day, too. Albert Jay Nock’s masterpiece. As I’d figured, I was instantly drawn by the subdued brilliance of his prose, then immersed in the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Very few social critics in all of history have really seen things the way they are. Nock is one of those very few. Quietly persistent, this book is still in print and still being read two generations after his death. It will be read for many generations more. And no more than that needs to be said, I think.

And the days just kind of rolled by. We bummed about, each doing “what was right in his own eyes.” We checked out the local tourist traps, where everything was half price. Every evening, the ladies cooked up the lone formal meal for dinner. We dined on grilled steaks, chicken, seafood. And we loafed to our hearts’ content. The musical among us sang and strummed their guitars. On Wednesday night, we had our traditional Mennonite hymn sing. Janice didn’t forget the hymnals this time. Fred played the guitar and Greg, a newcomer, picked his banjo as we sat in a semi-circle and sang a great many of the old favorites. We finished with a rousing 3-group sing-around of “All the Way.” We all made joyful noises, those who could sing and those of us who couldn’t. The house rocked with our great roaring. I don’t think this house hears many hymn singings like that.

Thursday night was poker night. A quick refresher lesson for me, and off we rolled. I lasted for two hours before giving away my last lonely little chip. I lost exactly ten bucks, which is less than it costs to see a movie these days, and I had a lot more fun. Of course, the wine and spirits flowed freely every afternoon and evening. This is the beach. We were safe in a beach house. And not once did I see or hear a single person in our group get over loud or out of control. Not even close to it. It was all calm, happy, relaxed, paced.

It was an entirely different experience from other years, to be right on the beach like that. To look out the living room windows and see the incessant rolling waves. And to hear them crashing against the shore. It was wild, beautiful, and calming. I grasped the fullness of all that late one night, early in the week. After midnight, and people had drifted off to bed. I puttered about the kitchen, getting a drink of water. About then, my nephew Steven wandered in and sat down with his iPad to check his email. You up? I asked. How about sitting out on the deck with a nightcap? He agreed instantly. And we mixed some sort of concoction in a couple of glasses, and sat outside on the third floor deck in the darkness. Just chatting, catching up. Less than two hundred feet away, the white capped waves roiled and roared. It was almost surreal, the setting. And the minutes rolled away as we just hung out for more than an hour. Late night, good company, good drinks. No worry about getting up to meet any schedule the next day. That’s the magic of Beach Week. And this year, it was the magic of the beach itself.

Yesterday morning, during my beach walk, I strolled up to a grizzled old man, standing there stolidly, holding his fishing rod and reel. Looked like he’d been out on the beach for a while. He nodded and said hi. I stopped. How’s the fishing? “No so good,” he said. His answer made little sense to me. Do you ever catch a thing? I asked. “Yup. But this week it’s too windy.” Of course. That explains it. I stood and chatted for a few minutes. He claimed that on a good day, presumably when the wind was calm, he sometimes caught as many as a dozen fish. In one day. I’m sure you do, I thought. I’m sure you do, I said. I left him then, still standing, immovable, leaning into the strong winds.

And with all the week’s walking, reading, and general times of great merriment, I hardly got a scrap of writing done. I barely cobbled this blog together in time for posting. And this week, that’s just perfectly fine with me. I am where I am and it is what it is. It’s a different dimension, down here by the sea.

And in this different dimension, down here by the sea, a few things became very clear to me this week. I’ve known these things instinctively, just never took the time to process them. Now I have. There will never be a so-called “sequel” to my book until I reach that state of mind where it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Or what anyone’s expectations are. Not anyone, anywhere. Not in my readers’ world. And not in my publisher’s world. Once I reach that distant point, once I can see the cresting ocean waves in my head, once I can stand at the shore fishing, it doesn’t matter if it’s too windy, it doesn’t matter if it makes no sense to anyone else, then, and only then, it will come, the writing of my story. I’m not there yet, and won’t be there for a while. But I know now where I need to be.

And that was Beach Week for one more year.

*******************************************

Housekeeping note. On Friday evening, Sept. 28th, I will be doing a book talk at Grove City College in Grove City, PA. The book talk is scheduled for 6:30 in the Moreledge Great Room of Rathburn Hall. The event is free and open to the public. I’ll be happy to sign the book you bring, or the book you buy there. For more information, contact the people at the college switchboard at 724-458-2000.

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Bob Jones and Me (Sketch #16)

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which

of us is not forever a stranger and alone?…We seek the

great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven…

–Thomas Wolfe

_____________

Twenty-one years ago, I packed up all my earthly possessions, which consisted of a fairly meager little pile. A sparse assortment of clothes, a few dress pants, jeans, a few dress shirts, and a couple of suits. And a couple of boxes holding a decent collection of books. And many boxes of odds and ends, the dust of living. More than enough to fill a car. And I loaded all my stuff into my ugly tan-gold T Bird. I felt it in my head and heart, the loss of leaving the familiar. But I had accomplished all I could here. It was time to leave the land that had been my home for the past three years. Daviess.

I sensed it would be for good. And I felt it, the fleeting sadness of knowing the great things that had happened here in the past few years were over. Here, I had approached and entered a shining city on a hill. Vincennes University. And here I had conquered the odds and emerged victorious and confident. And now I would leave behind the friendships and relationships that would fade with distance and time. Sure, you tell your friends. We’ll stay in touch, and I’ll be back. But you know it will never be the same.

I left Daviess on a Monday morning. The sagging T Bird kind of staggered down the highway. I turned to the south and headed out. My destination: Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Bob Jones University. The place that almost rivals the Amish, when it comes to legends and myths. Even back then, I was told. If you tell someone you went to BJU, get ready to duck or pucker. Because you’ll either get slugged or kissed. It hasn’t been quite that bad, but there’s something to the saying. Over the years, I’ve heard just about every rumor there is out there about how things really are on campus. And always, when I heard the stories, I just laughed and shook my head. Where did you hear a thing like that? Are you sure it’s true? Well, let me tell you how it was when I went there, back in 1991-93. And people kind of drew back, astounded. “You attended there? But you seem so, well, nice. How could a guy like you have come from a place like that?” Maybe because the “place like that” isn’t quite the ignorant dump you think it is, I thought. But I usually just bit my tongue.

“It’s a racist school,” some people snarled contemptuously. “It’s militaristic,” my liberal friends gasped in horror. But the most persistent myth I’ve run into: “Oh, yeah, that’s the place where they have separate sidewalks for guys and girls.” Countless people know that fact without the slightest doubt. Even when I tell them I was there and never saw such a thing, it’s still true, in their minds. It’s all a bit strange. It’s like facts don’t matter.

I will always be proud to be a BJU grad, and I look back over those years with a lot of fond memories. A few negative things cropped up here and there, sure, but those will come at you in any setting. I walked into BJU mostly intimidated. I’d heard how tough they were academically. And how they had, like, a thousand rules of conduct. But still, I chose to go. Because at that moment, it seemed like the best choice. Or at least the choice I was most comfortable with.

And looking back, it was almost lackadaisical, how it all worked out that I ended up at BJU. It could have been just about anywhere else. Somehow, though, a few figures I admired in my plain Mennonite world steered me there. Sang the praises of the place. So during my second year at Vincennes, I sent for an application. Filled it out and mailed it in. I was, of course, accepted. Right on, I thought. This will be the place for me.

The rulebook they sent made me a little uneasy. Dress codes, infinite specific rules of conduct, how long your hair may be, and on and on. I had just emerged from a world of infinite rules, seemed like. But I was more comfortable in a structured setting, I think. However tough the rules, I could take it if I set my mind to it. That’s what I figured. Besides, there were a few other things that that drew me.

The first and primary thing. I had family in the area. Sister Maggie and brother Jesse and their families lived over close to Abbeville. And Nathan lived and worked in Seneca. All points within an hour’s drive or so. I’d hang out weekends. And that strong pull of family just settled it, in my head. But there was still more.

I arrived at BJU a few days before my 30th birthday. Students have to live on campus until age 25. After that, they can live off campus and work. Basically have a normal life. And that’s what I planned on doing. And with my head swimming with vague, great dreams, I pulled into Greenville with my loaded T Bird. Eagerly. I was here, whatever might come. And, of course, a few snags jumped up instantly. My planned lodging didn’t work out, and the IHOP restaurant manager who had promised me a waiter job reneged when I walked in. Eventually, though, I found another waiter job at Swenson’s Ice Cream Gazebo, and lodging in a little trailer in a trailer park near the campus. Some kindly, simple guy named Jim had a spare bedroom in his trailer. He’d prayed about it, he told me later, and decided he would rent it out. And I just happened to show up. We had little in common, which I’ve found makes for the best roommates. In daily interaction, we talked and got a glimpse of each others’ world. But otherwise, no expectations.

It was late August, and it was hot. I timidly walked about the campus, trying to get my bearings. Lots of clean cut people swarmed about. Students, teachers, administrators, and more students. Everyone seemed positive and upbeat. At least they smiled as if they were. And I signed up for my classes, and got ready for the first day.

It’s a beautiful place, the University. Impeccably groomed grounds. Whatever was done there was done right. That attitude permeated the place. BJU is a fundamentalist Baptist school, where everything is done for the Lord. It’s pretty much a self sufficient campus, complete with hospital, large modern auditorium, the greatest collection of old religious art in the world (or one of them), its own security force complete with cop cars, dorms and class rooms. And I realized on the first day that I wasn’t in Vincennes anymore. Not in any sense, including the quality of the education. Not knocking Vincennes, here. Just saying, a private four-year University is going to be much tougher sailing.

During my second year at Vincennes, I took 21 hours of classes both semesters. And easily breezed right through. At BJU, I bravely signed up for 18 hours the first semester. Surely I could handle that much. But before the first week ended, I did what I never thought I’d do. I dropped a class, reducing my load to 15 hours. And even that seemed overwhelming. These people smiled and smiled. And then they piled on the work load and upped the expectations. They demanded the very best efforts from all their students. You won’t sail through any classes at BJU. I can guarantee you that.

And I uneasily settled in to my routine. This was a new place, an entirely new culture. Everyone looked and dressed the same, pretty much. Skirts and blouses for the girls, suits and ties and wingtips or tasseled loafers for the guys, at least until noon. You had to dress up in the morning, which was a serious problem for me. I had never really learned to “dress up” and so my wardrobe was quite limited. A half dozen shirts. Four or five dress pants. But mostly, I dreaded the mornings because I was different. And being “different” was a big part of the reason I could not abide with the Amish.

I was a member of a plain Mennonite church in Daviess. Where the women wore coverings. And the men wore those detestable straight-cut suit coats with no tie. When I entered BJU, I had never worn a tie. Never, in all my life. I came from a place where sermons were preached about how a tie can only be a symbol of pride. And to their credit, the BJU people made a rare exception in their rigid rules for Mennonites like me. I was allowed to wear the detestable straight-cut suit coat, and no tie. But it was so different and I was so painfully aware of that difference that it almost ruined my first semester. Everyone was staring at me. I could feel it wherever I went. In class. Walking about. And at chapel. As the weeks crept by, I actually nursed in my heart the vague hope that some mild misfortune would befall me, so I could get out of this place with some dignity. Something, anything, that’s what I wished for. Maybe an accident, like a broken arm or leg. That would do it. I could leave and never look back. But no such misfortune ever showed up. So I slogged on, day after dreary, dreadful day.

In my plain straight-cut suit with my friend, the lovely Elizabeth Reed.

By the fountain inside the front gate sans suit coat, obviously after lunch.

In the meantime, though, I faithfully trudged to classes every day, too. Kind of found the rhythm of the place. Go to class, find your seat in the back. The professor takes roll call. And then we bow our heads to pray. The professor speaks to God for half a minute. And then it was down to the business of learning.

I’ve thought about it a lot since then, all that praying going on. And it seemed to me after a month or so that these people weren’t that different from the Amish, not when it came to praying. No, they didn’t use a little black book. But their prayers were rote. How could they not be? I mean, how fresh can a prayer be, how heartfelt can it be when it’s mandated? When it’s just spouted out like clockwork? I might be way off here. I’m not saying the prayers weren’t valid, or that they weren’t heard. But even way back then, I recognized the formula of the prayers on campus.

And every week day morning around 10:30 or so, the entire student body trudged off to chapel in the huge modern new auditorium. Forty-five minutes or so. That’s how long it lasted. Attendance was mandatory, of course. You had your assigned seat, and ushers checked at every service to make sure you were there unless you had a valid excuse. I’m not knocking the practice. Not at all. I soon reached the point where I actually looked forward to chapel services, because the quality and depth of the preaching was so far beyond anything I had ever heard before.

And I heard all the guys who were anyone back in those days. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. was a grizzled bent old man in his 80s, but he could sure punch out a good sermon. He roared like a lion and cooed like a dove. Hellfire and brimstone. Come to Jesus. It was old time southern preaching from a century ago, and I feel privileged to have heard it from him. And we heard Dr. Bob Jones III, too, a tall gaunt man with a rather harsh rasping voice. His sermons tended toward vitriolic diatribes against the evil Catholic Church and the occasional broadside against the “false teachings” of Billy Graham. These guys were exclusionary, oh yes, they were. Which I’ve never had a problem with, because that’s what freedom of religion is. The freedom not only to worship as you see fit, but also the freedom to exclude.

And I heard, too, the sermons of various local preachers and the many Preacher Boys in training at BJU. It was quite an honor for them, I learned, to get asked to preach at chapel. And for the first time in my life, I grasped what it was to really dig into the Scriptures. Amish sermons are mostly extemporaneous, often rambling. The Mennonites I had joined were a little more prepared with their sermons, but still, they tended to bebop all over the place, while preaching a lot of light fluffy stuff with neat little lessons wrapped up at the end. Not the BJU guys. They got up there behind the podium and belted out an entire half hour sermon, not from one chapter. But from one verse, sometimes. And sometimes one phrase from one verse. I marveled at it all, the apologetics of Christian Fundamentalism. And I absorbed their words.

And while I thought their messages edged to the harsher side of Christianity, I didn’t fuss unduly in my mind. I would take from this place what I could, and apply it to my life. And besides, I wasn’t quite sure where I stood on many peripheral issues. Hey, I would be here for two years. Then I’d move on, back to my little Mennonite world. That was my plan back then. Maybe I could even tell them about this marvelous in-depth preaching I had heard at BJU (that’s a joke).

There was one aspect of their teachings that bugged me, though. And that was their eschatology. Their end-times teachings. BJU is (or was back then) stridently pre-tribulation rapture. Jesus is returning very soon, maybe even today or tonight. We’ll all get raptured out, to meet Him in midair, Dr. Bob III would thunder. Then the great tribulation will be unleashed upon the earth. Satan will take over the whole world. He’ll take over this University, too, and use it for his evil purposes. But we’ll be with God, up there, so it won’t matter what Satan does down here.

But wait a minute, I thought, even back then. If Jesus is coming back soon, maybe tonight, for sure by next week, next month, or maybe even as late as next year, why are we at this University? Why am I paying you for an education? Why are you demanding my best efforts in my classes? What sense does that make? Why plan for the future, why study for the future, why get a degree for the future, if it will all be for naught? I couldn’t grasp it, quite, that line of thinking. And it still makes no sense to me.

And it’s still one of the most short-sighted, destructive teachings in all of Christendom, that pre-trib rapture stuff. My opinion. And it’s certainly not exclusive to the BJU people. It’s embraced by millions of Christians from many denominations, people who cling to the desperate hope that somehow they won’t have to die. To all of them, I’ll say this. Stop fretting about the end of the world, or about Christ’s return. Get on with living your life with joy in this moment. And instruct your children as if they will have a long life, too, and a productive future. Stop hoping not to die. I believe that every person alive today and those to come for generations to come will one day die. And if I’m wrong, hey, I’ll gladly concede my error in midair. What I’m saying is, concern yourself with your own life, and your heart before God. The “end of the world” will come for each of us when we pass from this earth.

By the time the first semester ended, I was just stepping into full stride. I came through with decent grades, mostly A’s. And I changed my major from English Education to straight English, against the advice of my professors. “What will you do with an English degree?” They asked. I don’t know and I don’t care, I said. I want to study real literature here. I want to absorb the great works of the past. They backed off, then. And I walked forward into the classes my heart instinctively cried for, the classics. Shakespeare. Dante’s Inferno. Milton. The major poets. Marvell. Pope. Keats. Shelley. And Emily Dickinson, one of my favorites. American literature. Mark Twain. William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis. Faulkner, who ran with his coon hounds and hick country buddies at night, and churned out his brilliant stuff during the day. And on and on. I devoured it all. Guided by some of the greatest teachers I have ever known.

And after that first semester, my detestable straight-cut suit coat never bothered me again. I was who I was. I made friends, both with my teachers and many students. Some few of those relationships still remain decently strong today, twenty years later.

At the beginning of my second year, almost exactly twenty years ago, I stumbled upon the greatest literary voice ever to emerge from the American landscape. Thomas Wolfe. I didn’t meet him in the classroom. I just randomly picked up a ragged paperback copy of You Can’t Go Home Again at a used book store. I took the book home and opened it. Began to read. And from the first page, I was hooked. Between classes and work I devoured the book in the next week. I stumbled about, my head in a daze, barely conscious of the world outside those pages. His powerful, passionate soaring prose spoke to me like none other ever had. Stirred something deep inside. Absorbing it all, I sensed the innate knowledge in my heart that one day I, too, would write my story. I had no clue when or how. It was just a thing I knew.

There were so many good things about BJU, not least their high appreciation for the arts. The University was saturated with performance art. Shakespeare plays of the highest quality, with faculty and students playing all the roles. Internationally acclaimed orchestras appeared twice a year or so. Opera, performed by professionals. And classical music in all its forms. And we were required to attend. To which I thought, what? Required to attend? You couldn’t keep me away. To me, it was a huge privilege. And I went, sometimes with a girl, dressed in my straight-cut suit, and just drank it all in. Those moments remain among my most cherished memories of BJU.

And life in general bumped along. Every fall, when the students return, the University holds several nights of “revival” meetings in the big new auditorium. Good old home gospel preaching for the lost. And during those meetings, they fully expect people to stand, to recommit, to be saved if lost. Maybe even be re-saved. Dr. Bob Jr. officiated over both of the annual revivals I attended.

And he preached the gospel. Because Christ was proclaimed. But at the end, he unleashed some of the most manipulative methods I have ever encountered. Just to get people to stand. He was determined that all 6,000 people in the auditorium would be standing before he closed out the final night. First, he called out for the lost. If you don’t know Jesus, you can know Him tonight. Won’t you stand? We have people standing by, to lead you through those steps. And that was fine. But then, it was on to other goals. Do you have sin in your life? Unconfessed sin? It’s not too late. Tonight is the night. And a great many people stood. And then it was if you want to be a better witness for Christ, stand. Who can resist that? And so on and on, all the way out to where if you didn’t stand, you were admitting that you were lost.

The first year, of course, I leaped to my feet at some point late. By the second year, though, I was in no frame of mind to be led by a nose chain like a common simpleton. I wouldn’t do it just because everyone else was. I dug in, irritated. Whatever he said, I wasn’t going to be manipulated. Not this time. I would not stand. And I didn’t, as the drama intensified. His final call. Unless you are not a Christian, stand. I sat there stubbornly. I could feel the eyes around me. No. I will not stand. I will not. Dr. Bob Jr. closed it out then with a prayer that encompassed every soul in whatever state. Including mine. And there I sat.

As we were dismissed, one guy behind me came up and tapped my shoulder. Smiled hesitantly. “Here’s my phone number,” he said, handing me a little torn slip of paper. “Call me.” Nope, I replied. I’m fine. And I walked out of there in my detestable straight-cut suit coat, the only Mennonite in the place. And one of the few deemed “lost.” I also emerged with a new perspective of how things really are sometimes. And so my second year began.

A place like BJU could not function without toadies. Students who cozy up as aides to the big poobahs, students who are “groomed” for leadership. Toadies are universally despised by the average students. And toadies are also indispensible, to keep the system running smoothly. Especially the system of demerits.

There were demerits for just about any imaginable offense. You could get a demerit for thinking wrong, I think. But mostly it was stuff like being late for class, not showing up for daily chapel service (we all had assigned seats, and ushers checked to make sure they were filled), to the more serious but not unheard of stuff like drinking, smoking, and touching someone of the opposite sex. You were never, never supposed to be alone with anyone of the opposite sex, in any room or place, anywhere. But probably the most detested of all demerits, at least for the guys, was the dreaded weekly (or biweekly, I can’t remember) “hair check” when you walked into chapel for the morning service.

You never knew for sure which day would be hair check day. Sometimes the word buzzed that it was such and such a morning. But you could always tell as you approached the entrance to the massive auditorium. Extra toadies with craning necks stood on each side. And as you walked by, you could feel their eyes, scanning your hairline from the back, checking to make sure your hair wasn’t a shade too long.

And one morning, during my fourth and final semester there, I got nailed. A tap on my shoulder. I turned in surprise. I’d never been bothered before. An ugly little toadie stood there, in shabby suit and tie, frozen smile and all. “Your hair won’t pass”, he said. He handed me a ticket. Five demerits. I stood there, outraged and appalled. My hair was not too long. I didn’t say anything to the toadie, that wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. But I seethed silently. And that afternoon I stopped by the Dean of Student’s office.

The Dean, a lean gravelly-voiced humorless man whose name I don’t remember, was back in his inner sanctum and unavailable, his toadie told me. What could he do for me? I presented my demerit ticket. I got it this morning. Look. I turned around and pointed to my hair line. It’s not too long. It’s not. I want to see the Dean to get the ticket reversed. The toadie smiled patronizingly.

“That’s not possible. He can’t be disturbed right now,” he said. His name was Henry, if I recall right. I stood there stubbornly. Then I’ll wait, I said. I’m graduating this spring, and I have never gotten a single demerit. I don’t want one now, not for a judgment call like this. I’ll wait.

Henry was perturbed, not used to such blatant obtuseness. “Look, the ticket is what it is,” he protested. Then I’ll wait for the Dean, I said. And back and forth we went, for a few minutes. When he finally grasped that I was really not going anywhere, he suddenly reached out, took the vile little slip of paper and tore it in half. “All right, then, there you go,” he said resignedly. “I’ll make sure it’s struck from the records.” You’re the man, I said, shaking his hand. Thanks very much. And I was out of there, before the Dean could appear and mess it all up again.

I never did get a single demerit. Not in my two years there. It’s such a rare and shining achievement that Dr. Bob III sent me a personally signed letter of congratulation after I left. One day, I think, I will frame that letter. If I can dig it out from wherever.

In the summer of 1993, I graduated from Bob Jones University Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English and a minor in History. A degree that was not even accredited. BJU refuses accreditation from any government entity. They reject it out of hand. Leave us alone. We are doing our work, as we see fit. We are training the next generation of our people. And that’s a thing I respect and understand and admire. I value my time spent there. I would stack a BJU education against any university in this country, when it comes to academic standards. And I will always defend their right to be just exactly who they are.

The Lord’s vineyards are scattered everywhere. And Bob Jones University is one of those. The people there are serving Him to the best of their knowledge and their faith. Sure, they might not be as exclusive, not as special as they like to believe they are. But that’s OK. They labor there in obscurity, all those professors, and all those administrators, in the vineyard to which they have been called. I will always respect them for that.

The world is a funny place sometimes. You step out and start off on a path, not quite sure if it’s really the right one. But you strike out on the journey, and push through to the end. And years later, you look back and realize that whether or not it was precisely the right path, it was one you would not change if you could.

That’s me, looking back on my entire experience at Bob Jones University. I would not change a single moment in that stretch of the journey, not even if I could.

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“Home” to Aylmer…

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain

I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I’d see you again.

James Taylor, lyrics

_________________

It’s a long old drag to drive in one day. I know, because I’ve done it before a time or two. And as the day approached, I got a little edgy. Janice was flying in to Buffalo from LA at midnight. And she was depending on me to stop and pick her up. So by Wednesday, I’d decided. I would leave late Thursday afternoon for Aylmer. Stop and sleep somewhere in upstate New York, and pick Janice up before half the next day had passed. That way, we could cross the border into Canada and get to our destination in good time.

So at 2 PM on Thursday, I left work and drove over to my good buddies at Enterprise to pick up my rental. A Corolla, the nice man told me. Hmm. And I asked what I always do. Do you happen to have a Charger on the lot? The nice man punched at his keyboard. “As a matter of fact, yes, a gray one. Brand new, only 5,000 miles on it.” How much extra? “Sixty bucks for the weekend.” I’ll take it, I said. A Charger. There’s no better car, when it comes to power and smooth driving. And a gray one, yet. A most inoffensive color, for where I was going.

By four, I was loaded, and hit the road. Luggage. And passport. You gotta have a passport now, to cross the border into Canada. Which didn’t use to be, for most of my life, and still shouldn’t be. It’s the US that demands that, for you to get back in. More paperwork, more fuss and hassle, more stress, arbitrarily dictated by the state. I cruised out around Harrisburg and north on Rt. 11, then Rt. 15. The Charger pulsed along quietly. Handled beautifully. Around 7, I approached Corning, New York. A couple of hours from the Buffalo airport, according to my GPS. I’ll look around here. Find a motel. Settle in for the night, and get going in good time in the morning.

I settled on the local Ramada Inn. Which is below my normal standards. But the gas station guy across the street claimed it was clean. And it had a nice little lounge attached. I like a motel with a lounge, because you can settle in, eat, have a drink, and get to your room, all at the same place. I was immediately irked when my room card refused to open the door. I drove all the way around to the front office, and “ahemmed” at the clerk. She was apologetic, and fixed the card. It worked this time. I drug in my stuff. The room smelled very musty. Apparently the gas station guy across the street owns shares or something, I thought. But hey, I can make it one night. After dining in the lounge, I settled in. Janice texted that her connecting flight in Vegas was delayed. She might not arrive in Buffalo until the wee hours. I should be there by late morning, I texted back.

I wasn’t. Because my wakeup call failed. Yeah, I know. Use the alarm on my iPhone. I should have. But if you can’t trust a motel’s wakeup call, you can’t trust the motel chain. I will never stay at Ramada again, unless there is no other better option. I woke up a little after 9. More than a half hour late. Horrified, I bounced out of bed, and rushed about. Showered, threw my stuff into the Charger. Scolded the desk clerk, when I stopped by to get my receipt. She was apologetic. Sure. That helps a lot. Apologize. That won’t get my time back. And off I drove on the interstate west, the Charger pulsing along.

An hour in. I’ll call Janice, I thought. Let her know I’ll be late. I called her on my iPhone. No ring. I checked. No service. Ahh. That’s all I need now. No phone, and running almost an hour late. It was like it used to be, way back. You run blind, and get there when you get there. And then my GPS guided me off the interstate. What the heck was this? Do I trust it? Off we went, onto two-lane state roads. Winding through small towns, stopping at lights. Gah. Janice would be fretting. I checked the phone. Still no service. I would have no service for the rest of the trip into Canada and back.

The GPS eventually guided me back onto the interstate, and a frantic half hour later, at noon, I pulled up to the Holiday Inn where Janice was staying. I walked into the lobby, approached the clerk. My niece is staying here. I’m running late. I have no cell phone service. She was totally professional. “What’s her name?” Janice Marner. She dialed the room number and handed me the phone. I didn’t see the number. Like I said, she was professional. The room phone rang. No answer. Janice claimed later it didn’t ring at all. Then the clerk asked me for Janice’s cell number. I pulled it up on my iPhone, and she dialed it on her phone, and handed me the receiver. It rang, and to my huge relief, Janice answered. I’m here, I said. My cell service is dead. Where are you? I’m running late. I’m so sorry.

And Janice laughed and scolded me good naturedly. “That’s an iPhone for you. Meet me around the back. And by the way, I didn’t check in until 3:30, so I’m good.” I thanked the professional Holiday Inn clerk and rushed out and drove around the back. A few minutes later, she called my name. Janice, coming toward me with her roller luggage. I ran to meet her, and we hugged. I’m so irritated and upset, I said. It’s all been going wrong, so far this morning. I loaded her luggage and we were on our way.

Janice is Janice. My niece, my sister Maggie’s daughter. She will forever be, oh, eighteen to twenty years old, in my mind. No matter that she’s an executive in a national company. She will always be Janice to me. And it’s been probably fifteen years since we’ve gone on a road trip together. Me and Nathan and Dorothy and Janice used to pack up and take off, way back. We haven’t done that in a very long time.

But now we were, Janice and me. We chattered in English and PA Dutch, right along, as the Charger cruised over the road. She snapped many pictures as we approached the border. I detest borders of any kind. Countries should not have borders, or should at least be much more relaxed about the flow of travel over them. But then, of course, they couldn’t keep us all frightened of the latest boogeyman, or extract tribute from us. That’s what borders are really for, in my opinion. That, and war. That day, the Canadian border guy was very relaxed. What did we have with us? Oh, I said, I got a bunch of books along. He glanced at our passports and waved us through. Janice wanted to see Niagra Falls. Stop by for a few minutes. Of course, I said. She had last seen the Falls when she was seven or eight. And I hadn’t seen the Falls in forty years or so.

We pulled off the interstate and cruised down the little two-lane highway into Niagra. It’s a beautiful road, bordered by neat little parks and a butterfly sanctuary. We passed the large flower clock, still exactly the same it was way back. The little town was packed with tourists, and it took a while to get to the public parking lot. An attendant waved us out back to a little booth. Two guys lounged there. I pulled up. How much? I asked. We’re only staying an hour or so. “Twenty bucks,” said the attendant. “But we have parking way out in the back for $5, and a shuttle will take…”

“Give him the twenty,” Janice interrupted. “No shuttle.” The guy looked startled. She doesn’t like shuttles, I explained dutifully, handing him the money. “Yes, sir,” he said. And we parked in a little field and got out to walk to the street alongside the Falls.

Janice at the Falls.

Self portrait, from Janice’s phone.

It looked about the same as it did 40 years ago, except for some massive hotels that had sprouted. The Falls themselves were as powerful and breathtaking as ever. The old rusting hulk of a ship still sits there, stuck in the rocks, exactly as it has been for decades. We walked up to the fence at different points, and took pictures. Less than an hour later, we hit the road to Tillsonburg.

Canada is a cool country, just different from what I’m used to. It seems strange that I was born there. The money is colored. The roads are good, generally, and all signs are in English and French. And people drive like maniacs, at least on the main roads. By shortly after 5, we approached the town. Now for a motel. It’s tough, to find a good motel in small Ontario towns. Tillsonburg has a Howard Johnson’s, which was converted from a Super 8. Any motel converted from a Super 8 is not something that particularly attracts me. Janice was simply appalled. “No way we’re staying there,” she said firmly. On the south side of town, we drove by a big old mill, which had been remodeled into an inn. Milltales Inn. It looked quite unique. “Let’s check it out,” Janice said. So we did. The nice man took us upstairs, and we were astounded. Every room was paneled in different wood. Oak, Maple, Pine, and so forth. Every room was spotless. And yes, they were usually booked, but they did have two rooms available for two nights. We didn’t blink, but signed up immediately. After refreshing ourselves a bit, we headed on out to my sister Rosemary’s farm in the Aylmer community. Where Mom was staying.

Milltales Inn.

I had no qualms at all about returning to Aylmer. No stirrings of fear or restlessness. Not from the people there, not from the area. I was a little tense about seeing Mom, though. I had never seen her when she didn’t speak my name. We drove north from Highway 3, then west past my old home place. Then right at the next crossroad. And the farm loomed before us. We drove in and parked.

They were expecting us. Rosemary and her husband Joe Gascho had invited all their children home for supper that evening. (The children who live in Aylmer, I mean. They have children scattered in many places, and not all of them remain Amish.) They had not yet arrived, so we were in good time. We walked in, greeted my sister and her youngest daughter, Edna. And there she sat beside the kitchen stove, reclining in her wheelchair, her lap covered with a light quilt. Mom. I can’t remember if her eyes were closed. She seemed impossibly small, shrunken. I walked up to her and took her hand. Mom. It’s me. Ira. Her sunken face lit into a smile, but it was not a smile of recognition. Her vacant eyes stared past me at nothing. Still, she stirred. Spoke a few incoherent words. I stood there and held her hand.

Mom.

She didn’t know me. But other than a brief second of shock at her emaciated condition, I was OK. Guess I’d steeled myself mentally. I sat and chatted with Rosemary. Because of an injury to one leg, she can’t walk at the moment. But she sat at the kitchen table, peeling peaches or some such thing for supper. Janice immediately stepped in to help Edna get ready for the evening crowd. A few minutes later, Dad walked in from their little house next door. Both are connected by a deck and walkway, so they can push Mom back and forth on her wheelchair. Dad greeted me with a handshake. We chatted for a few moments. And Janice walked up and he greeted her joyfully. She’s a spitting image of her mother in her youth, and Dad always sees his daughter when he sees and talks to Janice.

Titus and Ruth had arrived a bit earlier, and were resting in a side bedroom. Soon he rolled out in his chair, and we greeted each other. It was good to see my brother again. We sat and visited as we waited for Rosemary’s children to arrive.

The food was ready, and by 7 or so, the buggies had quietly rolled in. Aylmer buggies don’t rattle, not unless they are in bad shape, like Dad’s used to be years back. Because they have rubber tires on the wheels. The buggies hardly make a sound, going down the road. And Rosemary’s children came home with their families. Eunice and her husband David. Simon and his wife, Kathleen. Naomi and her husband Peter. Philip and his wife, Miriam. And Lester and his wife, Tina. They came, they smiled, they shook my hand. They openly and totally welcomed Janice and me.

Rosemary had planned to eat outside, but it was a bit chilly for an August evening. So everyone gathered around inside the house. It was a full place. We ate cafeteria style, and I sat there in the circle, enjoying the simple, delicious food. And I was struck by a deep, deep sense of how much the Amish value the family structure. Here, in this room, sat my parents. Dad and Mom. And their oldest daughter and her husband. And their children. And their children’s children. Four generations, right there at that time and place. Sure, Mom was out of it, pretty much. But still, she was there, surrounded by people who loved her and cared for her.

The children and the young adults sat outside on the deck. And I heard the cheerful murmur of their conversations, interspersed with bursts of laughter. It’s tough, it really is, to walk away from something like that. And yet, many of us have chosen to, because the cost of staying was too high.

I have never regretted my choice. But that night, sitting there with a close-knit branch of my extended family, absorbing who and what they are, I realized anew what I had really walked away from for the first time in a long time. It was bittersweet, to absorb that, and I felt the loss of what I had left all the way down, deep inside.

At eight, it was time to get Mom to bed. I was asked to help, which I gladly did. They get her up at 8 or 9 in the morning, then back to bed at noon, then up again at 4, then back to bed at 8 again. That’s a lot of back and forth. But they have a system. She sits on a large thin pad on her wheelchair. The pad has loops attached. And they bought a manual winch with an arm. It was designed to do exactly this job. She’s wheeled up beside the bed, the winch arm is lowered, the straps are attached, and up and over she goes. The pad is then removed. She actually enjoys the rides up and over. “Put your hands here, on the crossbar,” they tell her. And she does. We put her to bed and pulled the curtain over the window. In a minute, she was asleep. That’s what she does now, mostly. She sleeps and sleeps.

Saturday. Titus and I wanted to go tour the old home place, and the school house. Janice and I arrived at Rosemary’s place around ten. They were loaded in the van and ready to go. Janice decided to stay and help out around the house. So I followed Titus in his driver’s van. Dad had hopped in, too. And Thomas, Titus’s youngest son. We pulled into the drive of the farm on which we were raised.

Our old house from the southwest.

The great old barn from the northeast.

The barn window where I once caught a sparrow, and the doorway where I set it free.

The huge Maple tree on the south side of the shop and house. We scrambled on its limbs as children.

We never kept our farm that tidy. Not in Aylmer, and not in Bloomfield. Both farms eventually fell into the hands of people who are even less tidy. Slovenly people who just trashed the place. Our old home farm in Aylmer is recognizable, but barely. Yeah, I know. It’s not my home anymore, and I have no claims to it. None. But it would have been cool if the current owners could have kept up at least some semblance of preservation. They didn’t and they don’t. We never went into the house, so that might be a different story. But outside, the barns, those are so ill kept, so full of manure and cobwebs and junk, that you literally can’t walk through them. All of that is none of my business, I know. But still, it’s sad.

We checked out the pond, from a distance. It’s half the size it used to be. They pushed it in with bulldozers. And they totally pushed in the little creek behind the barn. And then I walked behind Titus’s wheelchair as he powered it up the ramp into the old barn loft. Where we used to unload loose hay from wagons, with pulleys and ropes and a great four-pronged hay fork. The entire loft was in shambles. The proud old barn is going to fall apart, one day soon. It will, simply because no one takes care of it. I could say a lot more, but I won’t. I bite my tongue instead.

Dad, reminiscing in the loft.

Titus, surveying the mess in the loft.

And then it was off, to pick up Janice and Ruth, and on to check out the old West School. They moved the building, literally picked it up and turned in half a turn, and placed it on a new foundation a hundred feet to the south. From the inside, though, it still feels and smells exactly the same as it did back 40 years ago. Generations of Amish children have passed through this building. I walked downstairs and located my name, scrawled in pencil, back in 1974. Later in the day, we drove around the community and Janice took a bunch of pictures.

The old schoolhouse.

The doorway into the schoolhouse.

The classroom, exactly as it looked and smelled forty years ago.

Pointing to my name under the stairs in the basement.

My name in pencil, preserved for almost forty years.

Janice and Robert (Titus and Ruth’s son) on the old school swing.

The house where Nicholas grew up. The dull bricks have been covered with siding, but the many sharply peaked gables remain. The place has been cleaned up and spruced up. It is no longer gloomy.

Outside Pathway, where Dad spent much of his time, writing. The second window from the left on the gable end was his office.

That afternoon, Rosemary’s son Ivan and his wife Elizabeth and their family arrived from their home up north in the Elmira area. And a bit later, my nephew David Wagler (Joseph’s son) and his wife Barbara and their family arrived as well, from their home even farther north. They had come to connect with family from distant places. Janice and I were honored. Aylmer was the focal assembly point for people from many places that weekend.

Sunday. The final day. Usually when I traveled to Aylmer, I stayed for mere hours, or, at most, maybe a day. This time, we stayed for two days. I left the inn at 9:30 or so. Janice stayed behind. Nathan had traveled up with Titus to see his girlfriend Juanita, who lives an hour or so north. They were coming down for the day, and had agreed to pick Janice up and bring her with them.

I arrived at Rosemary’s home around ten. Everyone had gone to church. Except Rosemary and her husband Joe. And Mom. She sat there beside the stove in her wheelchair, covered with the light quilt. I had stopped by Tim Horton’s that morning and bought a box of donuts. Put them in your pantry, I told Rosemary. These are for you. Not for your guests.

And we sat there for an hour or more, Joe and Rosemary and me. Joe mentioned that he was approaching his 70th birthday, the age his father was when he died. It was an offhand comment. But I pursued it. When did his Dad die? And his Mom? The stories spilled from them then, accounts that rarely get written. They spoke of my uncle Abner and his wife, Katie. How they had passed. At home. That’s so important to them. To die at home. Rosemary happened to be there that morning, when Katie died. She told of how it was, how the family gathered around. As she breathed her last, Abner called out to his wife that he was coming soon to join her. Which he did, a few years later. And Noah and Nancy, Joe’s parents, they told me of their deaths, too. Noah had suffered a heart attack on a Saturday afternoon. He was rushed to the hospital, and no one was allowed in to see him. No one, not even his wife. He died alone, in a strange cold hospital room. The pain of that injustice still shone from Joe and Rosemary’s eyes. And they spoke of how Nancy, Joe’s Mom, had warned them over and over. When it’s time for me to go, let me go. Don’t call out for me to stay. Let me go.

I sat there, almost mesmerized, and listened to their stories. Stories spoken from one generation to the next. Stories told and retold. And again that morning I grasped in the deepest sense the culture that had birthed me, but could not hold me. There is none other quite like it in all the world.

Mom sat there as we talked, beside the stove. Covered with her light quilt. Mostly staring at nothing, smiling now and then. I went up to her and rubbed her hands. She likes to have her hands rubbed. It makes her smile.

Moving Mom from her house to Rosemary’s. Dad is typing at his desk.

Mother and sons.

I give all the credit to my sister Maggie, Janice’s Mom. She always told me. “When you get up there to Aylmer to see Mom, do this. Sit down beside her, and read the dedication of your book to her. Aloud. You might think she won’t hear. But read it to her anyway. She might hear it. She will hear it.”

You never quite sense the magnitude of a moment as it comes down. I decided to do it that morning before they trundled Mom off to bed at noon. Janice arrived with Nathan and Juanita around eleven. At 11:30, I told them what I wanted to do. Push Mom over to her little house. Go get a book from my trunk. And read the dedication to her. Alone, with no one else around. And everyone was supportive.

Janice accompanied me as I pushed Mom over. I parked the chair in the little living room, and walked outside to fetch the book. And that moment was the only time that she spoke my name, in all the time I was in Aylmer.

To Janice, she spoke. “Is Ira coming back again?”

“Oh, yes,” Janice replied. “He’s going to read you a story. He’ll be right back.”

And by the time I returned and Janice told me what had happened, Mom had drifted off again. And I sat there with my Mother. I wrote this book, I told her. Here. I handed it to her. She took it. Caressed it. Opened it. Janice quietly snapped a few pictures and left us. It’s about when I was a child, here in Aylmer, I said. She smiled. But she could not speak. And it’s about Bloomfield, too, I said. About how I left, and how I hurt you. I want to read the dedication to you. She smiled. And I took the book from her thin frail hands, and haltingly read the dedication. Switching from PA Dutch to English. That’s where I lost her, I think. There was no response. I set the book aside and just held her hand. And I spoke to her in our native tongue, words that were on my heart to speak, words that will remain between us in that room, at that moment.

That afternoon, we hung out at Rosemary’s house. A few visitors trickled in and out. Including Barry and June Kinsey, who stopped by to have their copy of the book signed. We hit it off and got to talking. They knew Les Shackleton, the auctioneer who had our sale in Aylmer, when we moved in 1976. A figure from my childhood. He’s still around and still alert. I signed a copy of my book to “the auctioneer of my childhood.” The Kinseys promised to get the book to him.

And Nathan and I caught up a bit and I chatted with Juanita and her friend Trudy Metzger, who had driven down to meet me. A fellow blogger, Trudy has been my friend for some time on Facebook. We’ve chatted there and even once on the phone, but we’d never met. The five of us, Nathan, Juanita, Trudy, Janice and me piled into the Charger and took off for a ride. I wanted a picture of the Aylmer town sign. We found it just outside town. I posed for the pic.

After we returned to Rosemary’s house, Janice and I made noises to leave. Rosemary almost couldn’t have it, that we didn’t stay for supper. Her children were all coming home again that night. We can’t, I said. We have to get going. We have hours to the border, and Janice has to catch an early flight to Boston. We pulled out around 4:30. We were both exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. It had been a wonderful experience. For me, to go back and see my Mom and family. And for Janice, to see her Grandma and to connect with relatives she had never really known. We talked about it, how everyone had so completely accepted us. It wasn’t that long ago when such a thing would have been impossible.

After we sat in line at the border for an hour, some thug border guard barked at us as if we were common criminals for wanting to return to our own country. I detest borders of any kind. He waved us through, then, barely bothering to check our passports. We checked in at a very nice motel, then sat in the lounge and ordered food and drinks and unwound for a while. And then we retired to our rooms. Janice left early the next morning before I got up. I left the motel around 10 and meandered my way home. And that was our trip to Aylmer.

Home is where the heart is, at least that’s what the old cliché claims. And clichés are always based in some seed of truth. Mom’s heart, I think, has never left Daviess, the place she was torn from many decades ago. Her childhood world, to which she was rarely allowed to return. But she can’t express that to us now. As she couldn’t express it years ago when her mind was clear. Even then, she could find no words to speak it.

Because she never had a voice to speak her heart. She wasn’t allowed one. All her life, she suffered in silence. And that silence, too, is all too common, all too accepted as simply another quaint element of Amish culture. It’s so much more than that. It’s real people, with real lives, like my Mother. And it’s all that she endured. That’s what that silence is.

My father now resides in Aylmer, the place he loves. He never left it, not in his heart. And now he has returned with Mom, in her current state. She will abide with him, wherever that is, as she always has through this life. This time, though, she will never leave Aylmer. One day soon, her body will be laid to rest in the tidy little cemetery on the west edge of the settlement. And one day soon, Dad will either greet or join her there.

And so they approach the end of their journey, the two of them together.

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The Old and the Young…

For the wild tempest breaks above us, the wild fury

beats about us, the wild hunger feeds upon us—and

we are houseless, doorless, unassuaged, and driven

on forever…

—Thomas Wolfe

______________

Wednesday of last week seemed like another ordinary morning at the office. But not for long. Early on, a phone call from a guy I didn’t know who asked for me. An older guy, from the sound of it. He wanted to check before he came out to see me. In a somewhat quavering voice, he introduced himself. He lived in Lancaster. Had just finished my book. Then he’d discovered that I’m local. That I worked at Graber. Would it be OK if he stopped by for just a bit that morning?

Of course, I said. I got a few minutes for anyone who stops by. Bring your book, and I’ll be happy to sign it for you. Thanks, he said. I’ll be out later this morning.

An hour or so later, he walked in, smiling. “Is Ira here?” he asked. Yep, that’s me. And he walked up to my counter and shook my hand. He was old, in his eighties, I would have guessed, stooped and bent.

His name was Chester Haverstick, and he lived in Lancaster. He’d picked up my book a few days before. After reading it, he discovered the author was local. Worked in the general area. And then, he thought, let’s see if I can get hold of the guy. That’s when he had looked up the Graber number in the phone book and called me earlier. And he had driven out to see me by himself.

He had been around for a long time, from the look of the seams on his weathered face. But it’s been a long time since I have been around someone who exuded such a deep, deep level of quiet peace. He was simply joyful. Happy. You could see it in his bearing. You could see it in his smile. And it shone from his eyes.

“That was a lot of turmoil you went through,” he said. “I had to think back to what my Sunday School teacher told me years ago. It’s all about love, not the law.”

It is, I agreed. It is about love. He leaned in to hear my words.

“Isn’t Jesus just great?” He beamed. He is indeed, I said.

Chester had self-published a little book about his life. He had come to talk about mine, but also to give me his book, aptly titled “My Life.” Would I like a copy? Absolutely, I said. If you sign it first.

He had forgotten to bring my book for me to sign. His primary purpose was to bring his book to me, I think. Which was totally fine. He opened the front cover of his book, and I gave him a pen. Slowly he scrawled his name in impossibly fine script. Don’t forget to date it, I said. So he did that as well. Beaming, he handed me the hard cover book. I thanked him. And we chatted for a few more minutes.

“I can’t believe I’m talking to you,” he said several times. Then, “How old do you think I am?” That’s always a dangerous question, coming from anyone. But I figured to play it safe. Oh, I’d say about seventy, I said. He beamed again and pointed up. Higher. Nope, I said. I’m not guessing again.

“I’m 94 years old,” he said, beaming some more. I’m honored, I replied. I’m honored that you came to see me, and I’m honored that you brought me a copy of your book. After chatting for a few more minutes, I told him I’d have to get back to work. We shook hands, and he turned and walked out. Still smiling, just quietly joyful. How remarkable, I thought. He’s probably my oldest fan. I can’t quite see ever getting that old, but if I do, I want to be as happy and content and joyful as my new friend Chester Haverstick.

And things moved along at the office, like any normal morning. An Amish guy called and ordered four sheets of metal roofing, twelve feet long. A driver would stop in shortly and pick them up, he said after I gave him the total price. The phones rang, but during the intervals, I thought a good bit about the old man who had driven out to see me that morning. How cool it was, that he did that. And I thought about his quiet joy. Absorbed it.

About then, a young man walked in. Mid-twenties, I’d say. Clean cut, with a well-trimmed little beard. I greeted him. He had come to pick up those four sheets of metal for the Amish guy. I took his check and printed out his invoice. He smiled at me. Then his eyes caught the little poster I have taped up about my book. Instantly he became alert.

“Did you write this?” Yes, I did. “Are you a Christian?” Yes, I am.

He leaned in against the counter, his intense eyes looking right through me. “Tell me, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?” It was a challenge, really, in the form of a question.

Well, what do you do with a question like that? I wasn’t prepared mentally to engage in any debates, especially in my relaxed state of mind after Chester’s visit. Whatever answer I gave would be wrong. There was no way I was going to get it right. But I engaged.

It’s love, mostly, I said. The love that Christ gave, to love others like that. And to meet them where they are, as He did.

He was friendly enough, and stayed friendly. It’s just that he was so adversarial. Of course, I had flunked the test. And he launched right in to tell me how it really is. Repentance. And yes, judgment of sin. Love is fine and all. But it takes more than love.

Look, I said. That’s all fine. Sure it takes repentance. And sure, we judge sin. But I’ll tell you this. You don’t talk down to people. If you don’t get right out there and right down there and meet people where they are, as they are, your message will be lost. That’s just how it is.

“Would you have time to meet some evening?” he asked. Sure, I have time. But I won’t, I told him. Tell you what, though. You buy my book and read it, then I’ll meet you to talk. Then you’ll know where I’m coming from.

He considered my offer for a moment. “I got so much reading to do already,” he hedged. But you have time to meet with me to “talk,” I thought. Which really boiled down to he didn’t want to meet to listen to me talk. He wanted to meet so I could listen to him. No deal, I said. Get the book and read it, then I’ll meet to talk.

“How much time do you spend reading the Word every day?” he asked suddenly. Another bunny trail, another trap. What difference would that make? Whatever I said, it wouldn’t be enough. Besides, how much time do I need to spend each day, to reach his level of salvation? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Three? Half a day? Full time all day, maybe? When do you reach the point of being saved from having been lost, from how much time you spend in the Word? Or how much time must you spend in the Word to keep yourself saved? Maybe that’s what he was after.

He left then, still wanting to meet to talk. When you read the book, I said. But he did take a business card, and I scrawled my blog address on it. He’d check it out, he claimed. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. And maybe he’s checking out this post. He drove out to the yard to load, and I kind of sat back and thought about it. I was tense from the exchange. Fifteen minutes later, I suddenly sensed that he had not loaded and left yet. I walked out to the warehouse, and sure enough, he had one of my Amish yard guys trapped. He was leaning in and talking intensely. His truck sat there, unloaded. I ambled up to them. Look, my guys have work to do. You need to get your truck loaded. Looking a bit sheepish, he backed off then. His metal sheets were loaded, and he tied them down and left.

After he drove away, my Amish yard guy muttered, “Some people think they are the only Christians.” Yes. I agreed. Some people do.

And there you have it. The contrast of two totally opposite encounters, less than an hour apart. From two totally different personalities forged from life and experience, and the lack thereof. The old guy. And the young guy. I’ve thought a lot about them both since that day came down.

From the old man, I felt calmness and joy. He left me energized and exhilarated. From the young man, I felt deflated and accused. And he left me drained.

As a Christian, I walk out there on the edge of things a good bit, at least that’s how many others see it. But I don’t shrink from what I know or from what I have lived and seen and felt. Or from telling it. I respect the broad spectrum of those who follow Christ, including many in the Amish church. And all the way out to the fringes of the “mad” preachers thundering on the street corners in the cities and towns across this land. The Lord’s vineyards are scattered everywhere. And He calls His children to proclaim Him in vastly different forums over all the world.

I’ll stand by what I said that day, though. You don’t talk down to people. When the gospel is preached from above, it can only be heard from below as an ultimatum based on fear, which is all so paralyzing and hopeless. It is best lived, face to face and eye to eye, often with few words. I don’t care where you are or who you are. I won’t speak to you from “above.” I simply will not do it. I will meet you where you are, as you are, it doesn’t matter where that is. That’s the only way I know to share Christ’s love. Because the first time I grasped and understood it, that’s how it was shared with me.

And when I think of the young guy who accosted me in the office that day, I wonder. What’s eating at him, that he has to prove his way is the right one, the only one? That his beliefs, his thinking (or that of his group) surpasses all others in the Christian world. Why are they like that? What drives them, what drives him, to proselytize so aggressively? Where does all that energy come from? Day after day, week after week, on and on, until it all folds in upon itself. Which it will, one day. Something’s eating at him. Something inside him is not at peace.

It’s the raw passion of youth, I suppose. I’m not judging him (well, maybe a little). I’m not condemning him. And I wish him well. But his life would be so much calmer if he could just settle in a bit, and see the real peace that is there, if only he could accept some very simple truths. To him, and to all like him, I’ll throw out a little challenge of my own.

Claim what you claim to know, without all the drama. Stop it, with your demands for this and that, for others to prove themselves to your standards. Or to prove your superiority. Because when it comes to the finished work of Christ, it’s all done. All of it. There is nothing we can do to deserve it. There is nothing we can do to earn it. Nothing. You will never grasp what true freedom really is until you grasp that simple concept.

You don’t have to take my word for it. But just try it. It’s impossible for me to describe the joy of letting go of all that baggage.

****************************************

Next Friday morning, I plan to head out early, hit the road. To Buffalo, New York. There, I will pick up my niece, Janice Marner, at the airport. And we’ll cross the border into Canada and head on up to Aylmer. Janice, who works for Waste Management as a high-level executive in their management’s consolidation team, has taken time from her hectic schedule to travel up with me to see her Grandma. I’m delighted for her company. We plan to arrive late Friday and leave late Sunday night.

And it’s looking like my brother Titus and his family, and maybe my brother Nathan might be there right over that time as well. So we’ll have a little reunion. But we’re all going to see Mom. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be like. She’s the focal point that draws us. Back to the site of our childhood world.

I want to see that childhood world, too, as much as possible. I want to drive around the old Aylmer settlement a bit. Maybe take a quick tour of the old home place and the old schoolhouse. We’ll see.

After my last post about Mom, things got a little, well, scary early the following week. I got a call from my sisters. Mom was shutting down. Kidney failure. And by Tuesday evening, I was pretty much on hair trigger alert, ready to head out on short notice. But somehow, as always up to this point, she pulled out of it. By Friday, she was functioning as normal. Those are tough people, of tough stock, her generation. And so she’s pretty much back to normal, or what passes for normal for her these days.

And it was all nip and tuck for a bit, but last Saturday evening, the great annual Ira Wagler Garage Party came down. I had randomly picked the date, August 4th, about two months ago. Invited more than thirty people. I wanted them all to attend, but of course, not all of them could make it. I ended up with 25 or so guests.

They started trickling in around 5 or so. My friends, Dominic and Jamie Haskin from West Virginia drove up. And many locals, from every imaginable level and background. When I throw a party, my garage is a safe place for all. Neutral. Like Switzerland. Doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’ve been. If you’re invited to my party, you have safe passage. We just hang out, chill out, and enjoy the evening and the company of each other.

I grilled Stoltzfus Farm Meats sausages, as usual. On charcoal. I provided the meat, the sausage rolls, and the condiments. And a case of premium beer. All guests were encouraged to bring a salad or dessert. And they all came through, as usual. It was a magnificent feast. The evening arrived and unfolded, and then it was over. For one more year.

The book reviews have been sporadic lately, but a few weeks ago, my Google alert snagged an interesting one. From Mennonite World Review, a mainstream Mennonite publication. I’ve never been associated with the mainstream Mennonites. And I’ve always been a bit leery of them. Not as individuals, the ones I know are quite jolly and genuine and accepting. But I’m leery of them as a group. They tend to run around and spout the latest left-wing gibberish, be it global warming or “social justice” (a code word for Marxism), gun control and a myriad of other pet project fiascoes like Obamacare and “Green” energy. The intelligentsia, especially, tend to hold such views. Seems like they’re always burdened with torturous guilt for the perceived collective current and historical sins of the West. And always calling for some magical government solution, for sure some state intervention to make it all better again. Which basically means the state plunders from the productive at gunpoint and dispenses the loot as it pleases.

And it astounds me, when I think of it historically. That they’ve strayed so far from the legacy of their founding patriarch, Menno Simons. That their ancestral memories are so darkened to the brutal persecution their people endured way back, their history of blood and death by fire and water and the sword. Inflicted by the state. And now, they turn to the state. Trust the state, the most murderous entity in all of human history. It makes no sense to me. I’m talking about certain “progressive” segments of the mainstream Mennonites, here. Not the more conservative groups.

So when I saw the link to this review, I opened it with some trepidation. They’re gonna whack me. I just knew it. I was very pleasantly wrong. The guy really nailed it. He made many pertinent observations. He obviously understood my background. Knew where I’d come from. But it was his closing paragraph that floored me.

“Wagler writes that one must make peace with the past. But his main passion is for freedom.” Yes. It is. My main passion is for freedom. Freedom from all oppression, be it religious or secular. Freedom from any oppressive church. And freedom from the state, which by its nature can only be oppressive and corrupt.

And then the reviewer concluded in closing: “For that ideal he is as effective a writer as was his father for traditional Amish ways. Despite the pains of breaking away, the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

Sure, this was one reviewer, out of hundreds. And most or all of those hundreds might dispute the point. But no matter. Even from one lone perspective, it is an honor to be compared like that, to be judged as effective a writer in my world as my father was in his.

There is no higher compliment.

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The Long Good-Bye…

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas

______________

She’s bedridden now, mostly, they tell me. She’d stay that way all the time, except they get her up every day. For at least a little while. Sit her in a chair, so her body position changes. And so the blood can flow. She smiles some. Eats, because they feed her. She doesn’t know a whole lot, if anything, that’s going on around her. Except she smiles sometimes, as if she grasps a bit of it. But then she reclines back to the bed and falls asleep. And she sleeps and sleeps. Through the night, into the next day. And they do it all over again. Wake her. Get her up. Clean her. Then feed her as a baby is fed. One spoonful at a time. Then she’ll sit for a while on the rocking chair, maybe. But always, soon, back to bed. That’s the current state of my mother’s long helpless descent into the cruel and darkening twilight that is Alzheimer’s.

Yeah, I know. There’s a million other stories out there detailing the brutal ravages of Alzheimer’s. But this isn’t one of those million other stories that I can shrug off because I’m not anywhere close to the people affected or involved. Nah, this one is personal. This is about my Mom.

We noticed the first little bumps in her memory about a dozen years ago, or so. You can’t ever precisely pinpoint the onset of Alzheimer’s, not when it’s coming at you, because it comes at you slow. An aberration, at first. A flash of anger so far out of character that you flinch back. What was that? Where did that come from? That’s not who you are. And that’s how it was with Mom. We look back now and see the first few times. It was hurtful to the person she spoke to. That could not have been my mother speaking. But she said the words, in all their savage meaning.

Her condition didn’t deteriorate that fast, really. But it was steady. And by 2004 or so, we spoke the dreadful word in our family. Alzheimer’s. Mom is coming down with it. I don’t really remember how I felt. Just a sense of foreboding, I think, along with a vague and desperate hope that she wouldn’t linger for years and years in that condition. Not like her sister Mary, who had silently suffered in a hollow shell for ten years.

They lived in Bloomfield then, she and Dad. In a cozy little Daudy house on my brother Joseph’s farm. Their house was connected with a walkway to his. Joseph had moved from the old home place north of West Grove. Bought Gid Yutzy’s dilapidated old farm along Drakesville Road, at public auction. A perfect place for his metal sales business. Two miles south of Drakesville. Right in the center of the community, right along a paved road.

And they settled in their little house, she and Dad. She still cooked back then on her wood burning kitchen stove. And on the kerosene stove in summer. Mostly did well, getting the meals together. The rhythm of her life was so ingrained that she walked her daily steps from habit. At that time, she kept a little flock of chickens in a tiny run down wooden shack. She walked out every day, rain or snow or shine, to feed them, talk to them, to gather the eggs. Fussed when the hens came up one egg short. Which one wasn’t feeling well? She’d have to look into it. Take care of the matter. And the chickens clucked and came running when she called. She smiled and chattered at them. Here’s your feed for today. Eat well now, and lay me a bunch of eggs.

And it seemed like that’s where they would end their days in peace, she and Dad. Right there in the cozy Daudy house in Bloomfield. Sure, most of the family had scattered now, moved out. Only two of their sons and their wives remained in Bloomfield. Joseph and Iva. And Titus and Ruth, a mile or so south and west.

And I remember the last time we were there, in that house, Ellen and me. During the winter of 2006-07, I’m not sure exactly of the date. We knew we didn’t have long to be together anymore, so we made one last trip home to see Dad and Mom. The roads were sheets of ice when we arrived. I remember the bleak dreary day, how the biting sleet swept sideways from the sky. The kitchen stove crackled, the little house was almost uncomfortably warm. Mom met us, smiling. Dad was sitting in the living room, pounding away at his typewriter. He got up to shake hands, then folded his arms, and he and I sat down to visit.

Mom welcomed us both. Ellen sat there in the kitchen with her, drinking coffee, and the two of them just chatted right along in Pennsylvania Dutch. Mom always completely accepted Ellen. That day she had a little gift. A little white home-sewn apron. For Ellen to wear when she’s cooking, Mom said. And I watched them and grieved quietly in my heart. The two of them together, laughing and talking. I knew this would be the last time. It was.

She went downhill rapidly in 2007, mostly mentally. And some physically, too. She was still active, though, still absorbed in her daily household work. That’s all she ever knew, and even though her mind was receding, her body stayed on autopilot.

In some ways, her condition was a blessing for me, I suppose. That spring, my world imploded around me. I hunkered down in the storm. All my siblings and even my father quietly offered support such as I had not expected and had never known before. But they never told Mom. She never had to endure or absorb the knowledge that her son had messed up his life to such a low point. And that he now was slogging through a tough, weary road. I’m glad she didn’t know. But with that blissful blessing of ignorance also came a sorrow, for me, a few years later. She never knew that I wrote of her, told of her world as it was, and so much of what she had endured. She never knew that I dedicated the book to her.

In December of that year, my brother Joseph moved with his family to Mays Lick, Kentucky. His reasons for moving are not important to this narrative. It was a choice, and when you make a choice like that, you make the best one you know. But my parents had no choice but to move with him. He set up a new double wide close to his own new house, again connected by a deck and walkway. And so they settled in this strange new place. Dad threw himself into the experience as he always did in life, walking forward, meeting new people, writing enthusiastically in The Budget of this great new place. Mays Lick. Mom mostly just quietly rocked and smiled. She spoke now and then, sometimes coherently. And she grasped that she wasn’t in her home in Bloomfield anymore.

Her children gathered around her when we could, at weddings, funerals, and sometimes over Christmas. And right up until recently, she always recognized us, and spoke our names. She wasn’t there much in any other way, but she knew her children. And with the passing of each month, it seemed, she sank ever farther into a world we cannot know, a world from which no one has ever returned to tell of how it was.

And it all got a little tricky, the care of them both. Decisions had to be made, decisions sometimes strongly opposed by Dad. His mind was still pretty sharp. Still is. But as Mom sank ever deeper into the fog, he couldn’t quite grasp the reality of it all, seemed like. And he had his own bright-line rules, the ones he had observed and followed all his life. He would not stay with any but his Amish children. If you left for the Beachy Amish or the Mennonites, oh, no. He wouldn’t stay in your home. So his options were severely limited to a very small group. Of his eleven children, only three remain Old Order. Rosemary, my oldest sister, and her husband Joe. They never left Aylmer. Joseph and Iva. And Titus and Ruth, who still reside in Bloomfield.

Mom takes a lot of care. And Titus and Ruth were never an option, because, well, a man in a wheelchair takes a lot of care as well. Plus, they adopted two rambunctious little boys, Robert and Thomas, about six years ago. Their home is full, their lives are busy. So that left only Joseph and Rosemary. Then a few years ago, Joseph came down with some serious health issues. He tires easily. And it was a tough road, for him and Iva to try to take care of my parents. But they did their best for a few years. It wore them down, stressed them out. And now only one place remains, where Dad will stay. At Rosemary’s home in Aylmer.

It all seems a little senseless, but it just is what it is. Every one of my sisters and my brothers with families would gladly take my parents for a turn in their home. Take care of them. Take care of Mom.

For the past few years, before it reached this point, they stayed with Rosemary in Aylmer over the summers. Rosemary’s children come to help take care of Mommy, as she is called by her offspring. And the Aylmer community kicks in, as well. When it comes to taking care of their own, especially the elderly, few systems are better than that of the Old Order Amish. No one ever goes to a nursing home. The elderly remain on the land they knew and loved, in comfortable and comforting familial surroundings. But still, to quote a line from an old Eagles song, “Every form of refuge has its price.”

And here, I honor all my sisters. And all my siblings, really. But my sisters stepped up. They scheduled family phone conferences, and you’d better show up. We all connected and talked. Vented, too. In the end, though, they stepped up to do what needed to be done. Joseph and Iva needed help in Kentucky. Who would volunteer to go for a week? And they stood tall, one by one. Maggie can go on this date, for this time. Rachel can go next. Then Naomi. And then Rhoda. And they went. Took the time from their own busy lives and schedules, dropped what was going on, and traveled home to be with Mom. To take care of her. And when my parents were in Sarasota during the past two winters, they all took turns again. Including my brothers, too. Joseph and Jesse and Stephen and Nathan all went down to see her, to be with her.

And during those times, something obstinate rose inside me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’d been gone so long. I don’t want to go see her. Why can’t I remember Mom as she was, before she reached this state? I used whatever excuse was at hand. In 2010, I was writing my book. I want to be left alone. In 2011, the book was coming out, and I had places to go and things to do. And no. I don’t want to see her like this. No. I’m not coming. And they left me alone, pretty much, my siblings.

Last summer, my parents stayed as usual with Rosemary at her home in Aylmer. Mom could still walk a bit back then, and one day she was outside with her daughter. There was little conversation, as Mom was beyond that now. But she suddenly walked out toward the road. Rosemary stayed close to her. Mom shaded her eyes with her hand and stared southeast, across the fields. And she spoke. “Something looks familiar, there, in that place over there,” she murmured. She took a few more hesitant steps forward. Still staring intently. “That place looks familiar,” she repeated. Something had triggered in her mind, and called her back to at least some awareness of the present moment. She was seeing and recognizing our old home place, the place where my family had lived before we moved to Bloomfield in 1976.

Last winter, they spent three months in Pine Craft. January through March. Dad rented a nice house, and they settled in. They took Mom out and about in a wheelchair, and she seemed to very much enjoy her surroundings. And again, my siblings took turns going down for a few days or a week, to help take care of her. My cousin, Fanny Mae Wagler, traveled down with them to take care of Mom for the first month or so. One evening, as they were sitting around the table, Fannie Mae gave Mom pen and a blank sheet of paper. “Do you want to write something?” She asked Mom. And Mom took the sheet and tore off bits from the edges. She dawdled for a while. And then, after some time, she picked up the pen and clearly wrote two words. Thank you.

January 29, 2012. Mom, Nathan, and Dad in Pine Craft

I last saw her close to two years ago. She was frail then, but walking. She knew my name and spoke it. And now there is no more to be said about not going to see her. Sometime in mid August, I plan to travel up to Aylmer, probably over a long weekend, just for a few days. Inside, I shrink from the journey, as I have for the past few years. But now it’s time. So now I will go.

We have prayed, all of us, her children, that the Lord would take her, would release her weary wasted body from this earth. That she would go to Him. That may seem strange and wrong, even, to some. But it’s not. There is little in this life for her anymore. Except only life itself, which of itself is always a rare and priceless thing. But still, to human eyes, there comes a point when that single factor alone is not enough to wish her to stay.

A couple of times in the past few months, her breathing slowed so much as she slept that they thought she had left us. But she was just a in a state of deep, I don’t know what. Something triggered by the Alzheimer’s, I suppose. In any case, she still remains, and we cannot question that. However senseless it seems to us. The Lord’s ways are not our ways. The Lord’s thoughts are not our thoughts. His timing is never wrong. And one day, perhaps soon, perhaps not, He will call her home to Him. She has suffered and endured a great deal in this life. She still endures. I like to think she doesn’t suffer much anymore.

I remember back in the early 1990s, when Nathan and I headed home to Bloomfield every year at Christmas How Mom always welcomed us, excited and smiling. Her boys were home. And then, a few days later, as our departure loomed, how she smiled still. Bravely. The sadness shone from her eyes. Good-bye, she said with forced cheer. Good-bye. Drive carefully and take care. Come home again. And she always pressed some little gift into our hands.

And we spoke awkwardly to her. Good-bye, Mom. We will. We never hugged, because the Amish don’t hug, mostly. At least not in any world I had seen up until that time.

I wish there were a way to say good-bye to her one more time like that. Not as I’m leaving her. But as she’s leaving us on the final leg of her journey home.

And I’d like to go back to those days and say good-bye to her one more time like that. This time, I would hug her.

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The Sansburn Farm (Sketch #15)

For this will always be one of the immortal and living things

about the land…whose only permanence is change.

—Thomas Wolfe

______________

It sat pretty much smack dab in the heart of the Aylmer Amish community, about a mile west of our home. On the main drag. An old house, covered with burnt-rust asphalt siding. A gaggle of dilapidated old unpainted outbuildings, including a huge old swaying barn, guarded on the north side by a poured concrete silo. On the south of the barn stood a complex of crumpling cattle pens and an even larger silo. And that was the place. A little odd, yes, compared to the proud, painted buildings on surrounding farms. But not as odd as the man who lived there.

His name was Carl Sansburn, and he lived there with his mother, at least during the early history of the Aylmer community. I have no recollection of her at all. She must have died before I was born, or when I was too young to remember. Some scattered fragments of who she was remain in the shadows of my memory, as tales told by my older sisters.

Carl was always old to me. A tall lean man in overalls, always dirty, his wrinkled face frozen in a half grimace, half smile, puttering about his farm on his old green Johnny popper. He was a kindly man who would help you out if he could. The children never feared him, nor were they intimidated by him in any way. I don’t know if he was born on that farm, but he lived on it for most of his life, I think. He’d probably never heard of the Amish before they settled around him. But he was one of those rare outsiders who somehow connects with the pulse of the surrounding Amish community.

His farm was like so many others in the area. Rich and fertile ground. About two fields wide, and very deep. Half a mile or more, it went back, the fields separated by a traditional farm lane with gated fences on both sides. He kept a few head of ragged cattle. Farmed the land faithfully, by the old conservative methods. Never put much money out, for seed or spraying. And his crops reflected his efforts. The fields produced, just not as much as they could have. And all that was fine with him.

From the right, the first unobscured face above the item the man is holding.

That is Carl Sansburn. (November, 1968)

The Amish guys, from front to rear: Abner Wagler, Alva Eicher, Stephen Stoll

Carl was a mumbler. A guy who talked to himself, didn’t matter if anyone was around or not. And actually mumbled when he actually talked to others. This came from decades of living alone, I suppose. He was pretty much irreligious, as far as I know. Never attended church. Maybe he was just very private about his faith. He may well have communed with God in his heart. I don’t know. I try not to judge such things.

Looking back, I’ve wondered. What it meant to him, to be able to connect, to participate in the life of the Aylmer Amish. I doubt that he thought about it much, or processed it at all. He just accepted life as it came at him. And to their great credit, the Aylmer Amish accepted him, too. Not as one of their own, no, of course not. Maybe even with a good bit of judgment. He was English, so he was probably lost. But still, they accepted him as he was. He was Carl Sansburn. Eccentric. Alone, on his farm. But connected loosely with them, simply by his farming methods. And maybe because he was so alone.

I’ve wondered, too, how life would have been for him, had the Amish never shown up in Aylmer. What was his social status, growing up? He went to public parochial school a half mile east, in the old school house the Amish bought in the mid 1960s. The same school house where I attended my first day in first grade. He went there for eight years, at least. But what happened then, in his adolescent years? Did he go to high school? Did he ever date a girl? And why didn’t he ever get married? Was he an outcast? Was he lonely? Was he too shy to approach or express himself to a woman? Or did he get burned, maybe? Was he rejected, scorned by the love of his life? What were the circumstances that made him who he was? I don’t know that anyone ever asked those questions, or even thought them. And why should they? But still, it’s a legitimate thing, to consider them now.

All these thoughts are pure conjecture, of course. But you don’t grow up in a community, you don’t go to school with your peers, you don’t live through your teenage years without some sort of social exposure to those around you.

I don’t know when his father died. But when the Amish arrived, there was Carl, on this ramshackle farm, right in the midst of them. Living there with his mother. And the place was falling apart. The barns were decrepit even then. And his fences, well, let’s just say they were barely worthy of the name. Old leaning posts, rotting at the base, falling over. Strung with rusty barbed wire, so old that you could twist it in your hands and it would crumple into rust. The place had once stood as a proud example of what a farm could be. Someone had done that, improved the land. Someone with a vision, someone with hope for the future. That someone was gone now. And now, the farm lay shriveled, decrepit, decaying. Along with the man who lived on it.

He farmed like we did, except with a tractor. He cut his oats in sheaves and shocked the bundles in his fields. Come threshing time, Carl joined the threshing ring. Arrived in his old car with a pitchfork. He walked the fields all day, a “pitcher” who only helped load the wagons. Pitching was the toughest job in threshing, because you didn’t get any breaks. The wagon drivers could relax while driving the loads from field to barn. Pitchers could never rest until the field was cleaned of shocks.

I don’t know what Carl ate at home. It wasn’t much, and I’m sure it wasn’t that healthy. He sure enjoyed the threshing meals, sitting there as one of us, devouring great mounds of home-cooked food. When it was his turn to thresh on his farm, the neighbors always came only in the afternoon. So Carl wouldn’t have to worry about feeding anyone. It was different, but everyone made it work.

He was frugal to a fault. Pinched every penny before buying anything. And mostly didn’t buy anything, because the money meant more to him than the stuff he should have spent it on. That’s why his farm was falling apart. He wouldn’t maintain it. His old ramshackle car finally collapsed one day, and the community beheld a great wonder. Carl Sansburn bought a brand new car. A Chevy station wagon, painted an ugly avocado green (The 1970s: the decade of that awful color). It took a while for us to get used to seeing the shiny new car swooshing up and down the gravel roads with Carl behind the wheel.

He always headed to the Aylmer Sales Barn on Tuesday afternoons. Just hung out there. And if my brothers or any other Amish youth wanted to ride along, all they had to do was show up, tie up their horse in Carl’s barnyard, and they had a free ride to town. Carl always smiled and mumbled pleasantly, and never asked for a penny for the bother.

In 1973, Carl let it be known that his farm was for sale. He was ready to retire and move to town. It was a strange thing to contemplate, that he would no longer live there in the community. “Carl was a good man,” the children said. He would move out of our lives, we figured. We were very wrong.

And that spring, Dad bought Carl’s farm. I don’t remember if Carl even bothered to hold a disposal auction. His stuff was mostly junk. I don’t remember, either, just when he moved to town. But I do remember that we farmed the place that year, while Carl was still living there. So we were over on the farm a lot, while Carl puttered about on his tractor, wrapping up his affairs.

One fine summer morning, my brother Stephen and I were there, working in a field doing something, I forget what. Carl’s old tractor appeared from behind the woods way to the south. He wasn’t pulling anything, just driving his tractor. He slowly popped on down the lane toward us. And somehow, a large chunk of splitting wood lay there, right in the middle of the lane. I have no idea how it got there, probably it fell off the wagon Carl had been pulling earlier. It was a magnificent specimen as chunks of wood go, round as the tree trunk it had been cut from, probably two feet long and about as wide, with a few protruding knots.

From across the field, we looked on with great interest as Carl and the tractor approached the chunk of wood. He never saw it and drove right up to it. The narrowly spaced front tires pushed the chunk off to the right. And then the large rear tractor tire nudged the chunk down the lane for about ten feet or so. We gaped. The chunk must have hit a little incline then, because it resisted. Stubbornly dug in. The large rear tire treads gripped the wood, and the right rear of the tractor abruptly lunged straight up into the air, as the tire clawed its way over the obstacle. Carl’s upper body was flung violently to the left. But somehow, the man managed to keep his grip on the steering wheel. And then the tractor plopped back down to earth, two feet straight down. This time Carl was flung somewhat less violently to the right. Again, he hung on, and somehow kept his precarious perch on the tractor seat.

The tractor puttered on as a startled and shaken Carl looked back over his shoulder to see what in the world had just happened. Mumbling at top speed to himself, I’m sure. Stephen and I just couldn’t help ourselves. We doubled over with helpless laughter. We howled until we couldn’t any more, until the tears came. Carl never looked our way, never saw that we saw. It was just one of those moments, frozen in my mind. The man could easily have been killed, or at least seriously hurt. But he wasn’t. And that’s why the whole scene was so uproariously funny. Or maybe our sense of humor was a little warped.

Sometime that summer, Carl moved to Aylmer. Bought a little house in town. And we stepped in to clean up the place he’d left. My brother Joseph and his bride Iva Mae planned to live there. Joseph had traveled down to Honduras, where Iva’s family had migrated with the Peter Stoll group a few years before. There, a simple wedding was held. I’ve always felt a bit bad for Joseph, because his parents and most of his siblings were not present on his big day. Not that Dad and Mom had anything against the marriage. But Honduras. It was halfway across the world, almost. And traveling down there by bus was just a bit too much for my parents to undertake.

Carl’s old ramshackle house was simply beyond filthy. Reeked of mold and rot. Legend had it that anytime Carl was of a mind to, he just hocked and spat randomly, right in the house. From the look of it, I don’t doubt those stories. We scrubbed and painted and cleaned and scrubbed some more. Tore out walls to combine little rooms into larger ones. There was one tiny bathroom, downstairs. I think we left that as it was, just cleaned it. We never did much with the big barn and outbuildings. The place swarmed with rats. You could walk into the old garage or the barns at any time, day or night, and see the vermin scatter. They weren’t that wild, really. More than once, I stood in the doorway of the garage with my rifle and picked off a few rats with .22 shorts.

Carl moved to town, but he did not go gentle into that good night. Instead, he became an even more important part of the Amish community. He merrily began hauling Amish in his now-dusty, increasingly creaky station wagon. He couldn’t see that well, and was far from a safe driver, but that generally doesn’t faze the Amish much. The man had a car, and was willing to do local taxi work. That fact alone was more than enough to keep him as busy as he wanted to be. So he trundled about, his car sagging under the heavy cargo of people and groceries.

It wasn’t safe to ride with him. One morning, he was taking Sam and Katie Yoder and a few of their children somewhere, maybe to the chiropractor in St. Thomas. A soupy Lake Eire fog had settled in, and visibility was near zero. They approached the railroad tracks on Glencolen Road. The warning lights were flashing; a train was coming. At that time, the great CN freight trains swooped through the land at 60 mph. Carl carefully braked his station wagon to a halt. They waited. And waited. And waited. The fog was so thick they could see nothing. They heard nothing, either. So finally Carl put the car in gear and slowly edged over the tracks. The car had barely cleared the tracks when the train came barreling through at full speed. Literally a second slower, and they would all have been killed. Carl mumbled excitedly. The Yoders requested to be taken home straightway. Katie, who had a history of health issues, was so emotionally distraught that she took to her bed for a week. At least that’s how I remember the story as Mom told it to me later.

After moving to town, Carl became a fixture at the Aylmer Sales Barn on Tuesdays. Kept a vendor’s stand inside, which was stocked with “antiques” that were mostly junk. I don’t know that he ever sold much there. But for years, he kept the stand, probably to socialize as much as anything.

Carl nurtured his friendships even with those who moved from Aylmer. In 1972, Bishop Peter Yoder and Homer Graber, both of them my uncles, moved with their families to Marshfield, Missouri. Both had been close neighbors to Carl, and both had befriended him. Periodically, right up to the final decade of his life, Carl teamed up with another Aylmer character and good friend, Charlie Newland, and the two of them set out to visit their old friends. They even stopped by in Bloomfield after we moved there in 1976. Keeping the old connections alive, that’s what they were doing. And those they went to visit were always delighted to see them.

Back on the old Sansburn farm, Joseph struggled along despondently, farming and milking. Like me, the man was not a farmer and would never be one. Besides, the old dilapidated barns of the Sansburn farm were enough to make anyone depressed, even a real farmer. And then, as 1976 rolled around, the whole scene changed dramatically. My family abruptly uprooted and moved to Bloomfield. Dad sold our old home place. And he sold the Sansburn farm to Alvin Fisher of Somerset, PA.

Alvin did not sojourn long in Aylmer. Never fit in, quite. Maybe it wasn’t the heaven on earth he’d figured it would be. And after only four years or so, he decided to retreat to where he’d come from. Somerset. In 1980, he sold the farm to the Jantzi brothers, Dan and David, who moved down from Milverton, Ontario with their families. The place no longer looked the same by then, though. Born of solid Pennsylvania stock, Alvin Fisher could not long abide on a ramshackle place. After moving onto the Sansburn farm, he had promptly spruced up and re-sided and re-roofed the old barns. Made them look fresh and new again. Improved the place pretty dramatically. He had flung out new fences and remodeled the house.

And the Jantzi brothers split the Sansburn farm into two parcels. Dan took the home buildings, and David built a long drive to the back of the place. And there he erected a whole new homestead.

I last saw Carl Sansburn at my uncle Homer Graber’s funeral in Kalona, Iowa in May, 2001. I recognized him immediately. Just much older now, stooped and bent from the long weary years of living a frugal, lonely life. And I have to admit, I stared at him, appalled. The front of his suit jacket was literally caked with layers of dust, now hardened into dirt. He had no one, no one to look out for him for even the most basic things. I shook his hand and smiled and spoke my name. His eyes sparkled as he saw the child he used to know in the man standing before him. We chatted for a few minutes, then I drifted on into the crowd.

He passed away a few years ago, I’m not sure exactly of the date. Left his modest estate to a niece no one even knew he had. And so he’s gone, the memories of who he was fading ever more rapidly into the mists of the past. Today I speak his name and write of him for no particular reason, really. It’s just a thing that came. Maybe because no one else has ever bothered to tell it.

In the end, I suppose, this post is more about Carl than it is about the Sansburn farm. But it’s about the farm, too. Dan and David Jantzi and their families settled there. David still remains, his roots firmly planted on his “new” homestead. Several years ago, Dan sold the old Sansburn home to Reuben and Dorothy Eicher, who now live there. The generations will move on, will come and go. Fifty years from now, maybe, someone might peer back in time as far as I’m peering back now.

And write of the same land called by a different name.

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